Global Research

“Despite widespread denial, the evidence that radio frequency (RF) radiation is harmful to life is already overwhelming.” 

But in a recent BBC article, they basically did just that: completely ignored the ridiculously large volume of evidence, which any ‘respectable’ news outlet should know exists and which if reviewed, reveals the major cause of the rapid decline of biodiversity, and the potential soon-to-come total destruction of all life on Earth:

“The accumulated clinical evidence of sick and injured human beings, experimental evidence of damage to DNA, cells and organ systems in a wide variety of plants and animals, and epidemiological evidence that the major diseases of modern civilization—cancer, heart disease and diabetes—are in large part caused by electromagnetic pollution, forms a literature base of well over 10,000 peer-reviewed studies.

“If the telecommunications industry’s plans for 5G come to fruition, no person, no animal, no bird, no insect and no plant on Earth will be able to avoid exposure, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, to levels of RF radiation that are tens to hundreds of times greater than what exists today, without any possibility of escape anywhere on the planet. These 5G plans threaten to provoke serious, irreversible effects on humans and permanent damage to all of the Earth’s ecosystems.”

“Damage goes well beyond the human race, as there is abundant evidence of harm to diverse plant- and wildlife and laboratory animals, including: Ants, Birds, Forests, Frogs, Fruit flies, Honey bees, Insects, Mammals, Mice, Plants, Rats, Trees.

“Negative microbiological effects have also been recorded… Effects in children include autism,  attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and asthma.“. – The International Appeal ‘Stop 5G on Earth and in Space’

“Microwave weapons expert, Barrie Trower, warns that within 3 generations only 1 in 8 children will be born healthy; and within 5 generations animals and insects will be wiped out.” – Julian Rose, “Synthetic Electric Shock”

Former UN staff editor, and co-author of The International Appeal ‘Stop 5G on Earth and in Space’, Claire Edwards, writes:

“Along with birds and insects, children are the most vulnerable to 5G depredation because of their little bodies.”

And in a recent Anti-5G rally speech in Stockholm, Edwards stated:

“It’s interesting to note that in the last 20 years we have lost 80% of our insects. And if we get 5G, we’re going to lose 100% of our insects.  When the insects go, we go too.”

Our beloved house pets have also been forced to absorb our electro pollutions. B.N. Frank, writes how “… exposure can cause various health problems in animals – including cancer.  If your pets become sick, many vets will not take exposure to any of these sources into consideration when diagnosing and treating them.  Even if you address your concerns about exposure, they may still discount research that has already proven harm.”

Hope S. Good details 22 common illnesses from which electro-smog and RF are harming our fur-babies.

The known effects continue to be evidenced, as seen in field tests this past year in The Netherlands, where dairy farmers in Stitswerd-Groningen witnessed the extreme effects 5G is creating in livestock:

“… Several hundreds of cows from the 5 dairy farmers simultaneously started running riot without a clear cause… their behavior really looked like agony, so it was not just a moment of frustration for the cows, it was really a life or death situation… the most logical conclusion is that the panic attacks are caused by the recent testing of 5G Wi-Fi in the North of Groningen, exactly where Stitswerd is located!”

“The phenomenon has occurred since last fall. “Suddenly you see that they jump and start running at the same time,” says dairy farmer Jan Oudman. “As they do, the walls of the stable are almost out. They sweat from the unrest. It’s really anxiety.”  – RTVNoord, “Wat mankeert de koeien?”

“… at The Hague, many birds died spontaneously, falling dead in a park. You likely haven’t heard a lot about this because it is being kept quiet. However, when about 150 more suddenly died – bringing the death toll to 297 – people started to notice.

“And if you are looking around that park you see what stands on the corner of the roof across the street from where they died: a new 5G mast, where they had done a test, in connection with the Dutch railway station, to see how large the range was and what environmental impact would occur on and around the station.

“If they all got heart-failure despite having healthy bodies, no signs of any virus, no bacterial infection, healthy blood, no poisons found etc. etc, then the only reasonable explanation is that it is from the new 5G Microwaves interfering with all the birds hearts! … The 5G mast heavily resonates with certain ERRATIC PULSED Microwaves (millions per second!) which can be proven to have biological effects on organs!” –Erin Elizabeth, “Unexplained Mass Bird Deaths During Dutch 5G Experiment”

Scientific Reports

“Published peer reviewed science already indicates that the current wireless technologies of 2G, 3G and 4G – in use today with our cell phones, computers and wearable tech – creates (create) radiofrequency exposures which poses (pose) a serious health risk to humans, animals and the environment. – Scientific Research on 5G, 4G Small Cells, Wireless Radiation and Health

“Future wavelengths of the electromagnetic fields used for the wireless telecommunication systems will decrease and become comparable to the body size of insects and therefore, the absorption of RF-EMFs in insects is expected to increase.” – Exposure of Insects to Radio-Frequency Electromagnetic Fields from 2 to 120 GHz

“The authors of the EKLIPSE review conclude that there is “an urgent need to strengthen the scientific basis of the knowledge on EMR and their potential impacts on wildlife. In particular, there is a need to base future research on sound, high-quality, replicable experiments so that credible, transparent and easily accessible evidence can inform society and policy-makers to make decisions and frame their policies.”

“The increase of electromagnetic radiation and its potential effects on wildlife has recently been identified by an international expert group led by Professor Bill Sutherland of Cambridge University as one of the fifteen emerging issues that could affect global biodiversity, but that are not yet well recognised by the scientific community. – (Sutherland, 2018).

“‘We apply limits to all types of pollution to protect the habitability of our environment, but as yet, even in Europe, the safe limits of electromagnetic radiation have not been determined, let alone applied.  This is a classic case of out of sight out of mind, just because humans cannot see electromagnetic radiation this does not mean that animals cannot ‘see’ the pollution or be significantly impacted at a neural or cellular level.  A proper research programme and clear policy measures are long overdue”. Said Buglife CEO Matt Shardlow.” –Buglife

Alsfonso Balmori asserts,

“Studies have shown effects in both animals and plants. Two thirds of the studies reported ecological effects. There is little research in this area and further research is needed. The technology must be safe. Controls should be introduced to mitigate the possible effects… Despite the widespread use of wireless telephone networksaround the world, authorities and researchers have paid little attention to the potential harmful effects of mobile phone radiation on wildlife. This paper briefly reviews the available scientific information on this topic and recommends further studies and specific lines of research to confirm or refute the experimental results to date. Controls must be introduced and technology rendered safe for the environment, particularly, threatened species.”  –Electrosmog and species conservation

“…Ferdinand Ruzicka, scientist and beekeeper himself, reports: “I observed a pronounced restlessness in my bee colonies (initially about 40) and a greatly increased urge to swarm. As a frame-hive beekeeper, I use a so-called high floor, the bees did not build their combs in this space in the manner prescribed by the frames, but in random fashion. In the summer, bee colonies collapsed without obvious cause. In the winter, I observed that the bees went foraging despite snow and temperatures below zero and died of cold next to the hive. Colonies that exhibited this behaviour collapsed, even though they were strong, healthy colonies with active queens before winter. They were provided with adequate additional food and the available pollen was more than adequate in autumn. The problems only materialised from the time that several transmitters were erected in the immediate vicinity of my beehives” (RUZICKA, 2003).”  –“BEES, BIRDS AND MANKIND”, Ulrich Dr. Warnke

[further published (peer-reviewed) studies on Bee Colony Collapse (BCC)]:

Margaritis LH, Manta AK, Kokkaliaris KD, et al. Drosophila oogenesis as a bio-marker responding to EMF sources. Electromagn Biol Med. 2014;33(3):165-189. doi: 10.3109/15368378.2013.800102. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23915130

Kumar NR, Sangwan S, Badotra P. Exposure to cell phone radiations produces biochemical changes in worker honey bees. Toxicol Int. 2011;18(1): 70-72.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3052591/.

“Plummeting insect numbers ‘threaten collapse of nature’: Insects could vanish within a century at current rate of decline, says global review.”

“Warning of ”ecological Armageddon” after dramatic plunge in insect numbers: Three-quarters of flying insects in nature reserves across Germany have vanished in 25 years, with serious implications for all life on Earth, scientists say.” –Damian Carrington

Conclusion

Ignoring electromagnetic radiation pollution allows corporate agendas to manifest through NGO’s “suggestions” toward global policy makers. C02 produced “climate change”, originally heralded as “global warming”, is provably caused by intentional climate manipulation.

 “All available evidence (including 750 page senate documents, presidential reports, and climate engineering patents) indicate global geoengineering/solar radiation management programs were first deployed at a significant scale in the mid 1940‘s.” –Dane Wigington

There are scores of independent scientists who have put their names and careers on the line in appeal petitions, countering the ‘science’ of the IPCC climate model used by the UN and proliferated throughout environmental groups, educational institutions, national governments and NGO agendas.

Dr. Tim Ball displays the contrived sleight of hand which created the C02 premise, and points squarely at the UN’s IPCC as the culprit.   He does it so convincingly that he was sued by three interested parties, and eventually won the 6 year-long defamation lawsuit in just a three week trial.

One final and unprovable personal observation I’d like to note: approximately 5 months ago, there suddenly appeared a new thick, solid-metal cell tower not 100 yards from my home, in a wooded suburb of the provincial capital city.  This new monstrosity is itself not 100 yards from an already long-existing taller and more traditionally seen cell tower.  Shortly after noticing the new tower, perhaps another month later, there appeared a new third tower, opposite the taller original, again not 100 yards from it.

So, these three now stand in a row, exceptionally close to residences, schools, sports fields, and a small tree-laden nature area, complete with its own tiny deer herd, jack rabbits, field rabbits, owls, hawks, musk rats, and assorted water fowl.   Except the water fowl are mysteriously missing.  We have ponds and canal banks all through the area, which in prior years were chock-full of ducks and geese and swans.  But they’re not to be found since last summer sometime.  I’ve lived here for 15 years, and am an avid lover of nature and critters, so I search as I walk.  But they’re simply not in any of their normal places.  I’ve seen a few here and there, but there are dozens suddenly missing.

The seriousness of these issues are becoming unavoidably visible and real.  We’re all busy with our lives, but it behoves us to look around and take note, and then act.  Do a bit of outside the box research; talk to neighbours and city council member; write emails to commissioners and mayors, asking uncomfortably assertive questions, because if we do nothing, EVERYTHING will change.

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I riflettori mediatici si sono focalizzati il 5 giugno sul presidente Trump e i leader europei della Nato che, nell’anniversario del D-Day, autocelebravano a Portsmouth «la pace, libertà e democrazia assicurate in Europa» impegnandosi a «difenderle in qualsiasi momento siano minacciate». Chiaro il riferimento alla Russia.

I grandi media hanno invece ignorato o relegato in secondo piano, a volte con toni sarcastici, l’incontro svoltosi lo stesso giorno a Mosca tra i presidenti di Russia e Cina. Vladimir Putin e Xi Jinping, quasi al trentesimo incontro in sei anni, hanno presentato non concetti retorici ma una serie di fatti.

L’interscambio tra i due paesi, che ha superato l’anno scorso i 100 miliardi di dollari, viene accresciuto da circa 30 nuovi progetti cinesi di investimento in Russia, in particolare nel settore energetico, per un totale di 22 miliardi.

La Russia è divenuta il maggiore esportatore di petrolio in Cina e si prepara a divenirlo anche per il gas naturale: a dicembre entrerà in funzione il grande gasdotto orientale, cui se ne aggiungerà un altro dalla Siberia, più due grossi impianti per l’esportazione di gas naturale liquefatto.

Il piano Usa di isolare la Russia con le sanzioni, attuate anche dalla Ue, e con il taglio delle esportazioni energetiche russe in Europa, viene in tal modo vanificato.

La cooperazione russo-cinese non si limita al settore energetico. Sono stati varati progetti congiunti in campo aerospaziale e altri settori ad alta tecnologia. Si stanno potenziando le vie di comunicazione ferroviarie, stradali, fluviali e marittime tra i due paesi. In forte aumento anche gli scambi culturali e i flussi turistici.

Una cooperazione a tutto campo, la cui visione strategica emerge da due decisioni annunciate al termine dell’incontro: la firma di un accordo intergovernativo per espandere l’uso delle monete nazionali, il rublo e losyuan, negli scambi commerciali e nelle transazioni finanziarie, in alternativa al dollaro ancora dominante; l’intensificazione degli sforzi per integrare la Nuova Via della Seta, promossa dalla Cina, e l’Unione economica eurasiatica, promossa dalla Russia, con «la visione di formare in futuro una più grande partnership eurasiatica».

Che tale visione non sia semplicemente economica lo conferma la «Dichiarazione congiunta sul rafforzamento della stabilità strategica globale» firmata al termine dell’incontro. Russia e Cina hanno «posizioni identiche o molto vicine», di fatto contrarie a quelle Usa/Nato, riguardo a Siria, Iran, Venezuela e Corea del Nord.

Avvertono che il ritiro degli Usa dal Trattato Inf (allo scopo di schierare missili nucleari a raggio intermedio a ridosso sia della Russia che della Cina) può accelerare la corsa agli armamenti e accrescere la possibilità di un conflitto nucleare. Denunciano la decisione Usa di non ratificare il Trattato sulla messa al bando totale degli esperimenti nucleari e di preparare il sito per possibili test nucleari.

Dichiarano «irresponsabile» il fatto che alcuni Stati, pur aderendo al Trattato di non-proliferazione, attuino «missioni nucleari congiunte» e richiedono loro «il rientro nei territori nazionali di tutte le armi nucleari schierate fuori dai confini».

Una richiesta che riguarda direttamente l’Italia e gli altri paesi europei dove, violando il Trattato di non-proliferazione, gli Stati uniti hanno schierato armi nucleari utilizzabili anche dai paesi ospiti sotto comando Usa: le bombe nucleari B-61 che saranno sostituite dal 2020 dalle ancora più pericolose B61-12.

Di tutto questo non hanno parlato i grandi media, che il 5 giugno erano impegnati a descrivere le splendide toilettes della First Lady Melania Trump alle cerimonie del D-Day.

Manlio Dinucci

Canada’s embassy in Venezuela will—at the end of this month—close. The spur for this closure is an open attempt by Canada’s Justin Trudeau to overthrow Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro. Canada is one of the leaders of the Lima Group, a network of countries that came together in 2017 with the express purpose of regime change in Venezuela. Canada’s diplomatic corps has played the role of facilitator for the Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó. Trudeau and Guaidó speak regularly. Their plot against Venezuela thickens.

The Canadian government held the meeting of the Lima Group this year. It helped organize the speaking tours of Venezuelan opposition figures. But, most controversially, Canada’s ambassador to Venezuela—Ben Rowswell—held an annual dinner and delivered a human rights award to people who amplified the voices of those opposed to the Bolivarian Revolution.

“The tradition here,” Rowswell said sanctimoniously, “is that Canada believes in the principles of human rights and democracy and takes pragmatic measures on the ground to unblock political situations.”

Unblock political situations is a uniquely Canadian way of saying promoting regime change.

Venezuela has been—as the most recent dossier from Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research argues—the target of a hybrid war. Canada has not been a bystander in this hybrid war, but it has functioned to give the entire maneuver the sheen of Canadian liberalism.

Canadian Weapons

Countries work hard to protect and promote their self-image. No state likes to be associated—for instance—with arms sales. Sweden, which gives out the Nobel Peace Prize, and Switzerland, which promotes itself as a neutral country, are leading sellers of arms—both in the top twenty list. Canada sells fewer arms than Switzerland and Sweden, but the places that it sells arms to should raise eyebrows.

For all the talk of “human rights” and for all the hoopla about the human rights award from the Canadian embassy in Caracas, it is Canada’s Justin Trudeau who championed a $15 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia despite the many criticisms of the Saudi war on Yemen. It is one thing to talk about human rights. It is another to live by that credo. Canada does not.

The Canada-Saudi arms deal did not take place in another century. It was signed in 2014 and executed this year by the liberal government of Trudeau. The list of arms sold to Saudi Arabia by Canada’s General Dynamics Land Systems includes the kind of Canadian-made weapons that Saudi Arabia is already using against the people of Yemen. It is quite one thing for a pompous Canadian Parliament to sanction people associated with the murder of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi (as they did in November last year) and another to sell arms to a regime that has killed thousands of civilians in a brutal and unending war.

Evidence of the brutality of the Saudi war does not necessarily need to be assembled for the Canadian foreign ministry. In July 2017, Canada’s Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland said that she was “deeply concerned” by the videos of Canadian weaponry used against the Yemeni people.

“If it is found that Canadian exports have been used to commit serious violations of human rights,” said the Canadian foreign ministry, then Canada “will take action.”

This is a curious standard. Only if Canadian weaponry is used to commit violations is this a concern. It is acceptable to sell weaponry to a country that is in the midst of prosecuting an inhumane war.

In June 2018, the Canadian Parliament’s Standing Senate Committee on Human Rights produced a key report. Three Canadian senators—a liberal, a conservative and an independent—found that “even though the Government of Canada advocates for the protection of human security abroad, it too often appears willing to compromise its values in order to advance economic and other foreign policy interests.” In this report, the senators note that it is more than likely that Canadian weaponry was used by Saudi Arabia against the Bahraini population in 2011 and against the Saudi public. This—the standard developed by Freeland and underscored by the Canadian Senate—did not bother Freeland’s department when it eventually provided export licenses.

No need to unblock the political situation in Saudi Arabia. No talk of “principles of human rights and democracy” when “Made in Canada” becomes the last phrase seen by a Yemeni child before the lights go out.

Canadian Mining

If you think about Canada, you don’t always think about mining companies and their human rights violations.

But these mining companies play a fundamental role in driving much of Canadian foreign policy, notably when it comes to South America, Africa and Southern Asia. Some of the world’s largest mining firms—as is noted in this briefing from Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research—are Canadian. Many of them operate in South America.

From one end of Latin America to another, Canadian mining companies have been involved in scandals upon scandals. The Working Group on Mining and Human Rights in Latin America filed a report with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights that is damning. “The Impact of Canadian Mining in Latin America and Canada’s Responsibility” (2014) should have shaped the way the world sees Canada. But it has had almost no impact.

The report notes that “the mining sector plays a fundamental role in the Canadian government’s efforts” in Latin America, to the extent of interference in the domestic affairs of a number of countries. In Colombia, Honduras and Peru, the Canadian government drove the drafting of the mining policies.

Anger at Venezuela has got to be understood in terms of Canada’s mining interests. In 2007, Barrick Gold’s Peter Munk wrote a letter to the Financial Times that summarized the view of the entire Canadian mining sector toward Venezuela. The letter called Hugo Chávez a “dangerous dictator” and called for intervention—“let us not give President Chávez a chance to do the same step-by-step transformation of Venezuela.” What bothered Munk and his class of mining executives was Venezuela’s push against foreign firms that sought to drain the wealth from countries like Venezuela.

Why was Munk so annoyed? Chávez’s government had just pushed for foreign companies to surrender their majority control over Venezuela’s oil reserves. This bothered Munk, but he was not alone. Canadian embassy officials in Venezuela told James Rochlin, a professor of the University of British Columbia, that they felt “burned” by Chávez. The Canadian government began to get cozy with Colombia against Venezuela. The roots of the Lima Group go back to the anger of the mining firms with Chávez’s desire to use Venezuela’s resources for the Venezuelan people. The Canadian mining bosses and the Canadian government wanted the Bolivarian Revolution overthrown so that they could take advantage of Venezuela’s resources.

So much for high-minded principles. For those who want to understand Canada’s foreign policy, don’t spend years studying its human rights statements. Put your hand into the dirt, touch the ore under the soil—that’s where Canadian foreign policy is rooted.

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This article was produced by Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Vijay Prashad is the George and Martha Kellner Chair of South Asian History and Director of International Studies at Trinity College, Hartford, CT. His most recent book, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, won the Muzaffar Ahmad Book Prize for 2009; Red Star Over the Third World (LeftWord, 2017) and The Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution (University of California Press, 2016); and the Chief Editor of LeftWord Books.

If you’ve read the headlines about the death of “Syrian activist” Abdel Basset al-Sarout, you probably think he was a pretty cool guy. Headlines referring to him as a “Syrian footballer, singer and rebel” make him seem like he could have been the love child of Pelé and Freddie Mercury with the politics of Che Guevara.

Sarout may have sang, played soccer, and rebelled, but he was certainly no peace-loving hippie. A more accurate version for the descriptor would read “Syrian footballer, singer [of al-Qaeda’s hymns] and [CIA-backed jihadist] rebel [commander].”

Sing it with me: “The World Trade Center is a pile of rubble.”

It is true that Sarout, as the media suggests, became the face of the revolution. So, fittingly, Sarout sang songs glorifying al-Qaeda’s destruction of the World Trade Center in New York City, a terrorist attack that left 3,000 innocent civilians dead.

In one video, Sarout led a group of America’s beloved “moderate rebels” in singing al-Qaeda’s most famous song:

We destroyed America with a civilian airliner. The World Trade Center is a pile of rubble. The World Trade Center is a pile of rubble.”

Osama Bin Laden — the one who terrorizes America. With the strength of our faith and our weapon is the PIKA [PK machine gun]. With the strength of our faith and our weapon is the PIKA.”

Video shows Abdel Baset Sarout leading a chorus of terrorists singing a famous Al-Qaeda song which boasts about destroying the WTC and turning it into a pile of rubble on 9/11 and praises Osama Bin Laden. This is the same man who is being hailed as a hero by Western Media. #Syria pic.twitter.com/cZRmf0ZW1h

— Walid (@walid970721) June 9, 2019

In another video, Sarout is among a group singing about how they intend to kill Alawites, a religious minority to which President Bashar al-Assad belongs:

If they say terrorist, it is an honor to me. Our terrorism is a blessing and a divine call. Alawite police, be patient, oh Alawites. We are coming to slaughter you without an agreement.”

In other videos, Sarout calls not just for genocide against the Syrian Alawite minority but also for the expulsion of Shias:

We are all jihadists! Homs has taken the decision. We want to exterminate the Alawites. Shias must leave!”

Western thought leaders are lionizing Abdel Baset al-Sarout who was killed fighting the Syrian army. They conveniently omit that he fought in a militia allied with al-Qaeda and pledged allegiance to ISIS. From my mini-documentary: The Syria Deception https://t.co/MpdkUbJkP7 pic.twitter.com/vLThkIMZFB

— Dan Cohen (@dancohen3000) June 8, 2019

That was from a rally in Homs, Syria, where Sarout made a name for himself as a supposed “rebel icon.” Shortly before he left the city before it was liberated by the government, Sarout recorded a video of his analysis of where the opposition to Assad should go next. In it, he calls for an alliance between the rebel groups of Homs and Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s Syria affiliate, and Daesh.

We know that these two groups are not politicized and have the same goals as us and are working for God and that they care about Islam and Muslims. Unfortunately some among them consider us apostates and drug addicts, but God willing we will work shoulder to shoulder with them when we leave [Homs].

We are not Christians or Shia, afraid of suicide belts and car bombs. We consider those to be strengths of ours. God willing they will be just that. This message is to the Islamic State and our brothers in Jabhat al-Nusra: that when we come out [of Homs] we will all be as one, hand fighting Christians and not fighting internally.”

After leaving Homs, Sarout went even further than before, personally pledging allegiance to ISIS, according to an Al-Jazeera Arabic report. Photos even show him holding their infamous flag.

I for one am shocked to see the media whitewashing the legacy of Abdelbaset Sarout, a commander of Jaish al-Izza (Army of Glory), which received weapons and training from the CIA. pic.twitter.com/2eD5qeWrrj

— Alex Rubinstein (@RealAlexRubi) June 10, 2019

Sarout would go on to become a commander in the Jaysh al-Izza (Army of Glory) group. Once a branch of the nebulous Free Syrian Army, Jaysh al-Izza was reportedly supported by the Central Intelligence Agency with training and equipment under its program. Weapons supplied to the group reportedly include anti-tank missiles. Underscoring Jaysh al-Izza’s close relationship with Jabhat al-Nusra, which later rebranded as Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), HTS has reportedly used the CIA-supplied weapons in its fighting with the Syrian government and bombings against civilians.

From pledging allegiance to ISIS to “rebel icon”: anatomy of the media’s whitewashing

Despite his terrorist affiliations, the mainstream media has rewritten Sarout’s legacy to their liking. Even al-Jazeera, which reported Sarout’s pledge to ISIS, called him a “rebel icon” in its English-language video report on his death. That video made no mention of any of Sarout’s terrorist ties.

Other news outlets from gulf petro-monarchies funding the proxy war on Syria even call Sarout a “martyr.” Meanwhile, an analysis from Israel’s Haaretz newspaper worried over the fate of other “fighting poets.” While the BBC’s headline played it straight, opting to just provide his name and that he died, the British public broadcaster called him “a symbol of the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad” and quoted another commander in Jaish al-Izza calling him a “martyr” in the article’s body.

Eulogies for Abdelbasset Sarout go like..
"He may have made some mistakes, but …"

A mistake is not checking the date on the milk before pouring it into your coffee, not urging the "revolution" to unite with ISIS in order to kill Christians. pic.twitter.com/wOyY1IL2Qs

— Lina Arabi (@LinaArabii) June 8, 2019

Did media fact-checkers all take the day off?

Below are a sample of headlines whitewashing Sarout’s jihadist “activism:”

American publications:

New York Times — Syrian Soccer Star, Symbol of Revolt, Dies After Battle

The Daily Beast — Syrian Soccer Goalie and Rebel Icon Killed in Northwestern Syria

NBC News — ‘Guardian of freedom’: Syrian soccer goalie who became rebel icon dies in battle

SFGate — Soccer goalie who joined Syrian rebel fighters dies in battle

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette — World briefs: Syrian soccer goalie who became rebel icon dies in battle

Israeli publications:

Haaretz — The Syrian Nightingale Is Dead, and Soon Other Fighting Poets May Be Silenced

Haaretz — Syrian Soccer Player and Icon of anti-Assad Movement Dies From Battle Wound

Jerusalem Post — Star Footballer Turned Rebel Icon Dies in Syria Fighting

Times of Israel — Hundreds attend funeral of Syrian soccer goalkeeper who became rebel icon

British publications:

Daily Mail — Hundreds of mourners attend funeral of Syrian goalkeeper who became figurehead of the opposition before being killed by Bashar al-Assad’s forces

The Guardian — Syrian footballer and ‘singer of revolution’ killed in conflict

Middle East Eye — Syrian footballer, singer and rebel Abd al-Basset al-Sarout killed in northern Syria

United Arab Emirates publications:

The National — Abdelbaset Sarout: Syria’s ‘singer of the revolution’ dies defending Idlib

The National –– Abdelbaset Sarout: showman Syrian rebel who declined adulation

Wire services (publications that provide other outlets with syndicated services, allowing them reprint their articles):

Reuters — Syrian rebel town buries goalie who became ‘singer of the revolution’

Associated Press — Syrian soccer goalie who became rebel icon dies in battle

Rudaw (Kurdish publication) via Agency France Presse — Syrian soccer goalkeeper killed in Idlib clashes — Rudaw

Turkish publications:

Anadolu Agency — Syrian revolution hero martyred after Hama clashes

Daily Sabah — Hero of Syrian revolution killed after Hama clashes

Hong Kong:

South China Morning Post — Abdelbasset Sarout, star soccer player turned rebel icon, dies in Syria fighting

Qatar:

Al Jazeera — Syrian goalkeeper who became rebel icon dies in Hama battle

While Sarout’s open calls for genocide and sectarianism were totally whitewashed by the press, his case takes its place in a long tradition of deception regarding the proxy war. In perhaps the most sophisticated propaganda campaign in the history of modern warfare, Syria’s White Helmets have worked hand-in-glove with jihadists while on the payroll of Western governments, while Western journalists have upheld ISIS recruiters as “experts” on the war. Sarout’s death is a sober reminder that citizens must fact check the media, since they refuse to do it themselves.

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Alexander Rubinstein is a staff writer for MintPress News based in Washington, DC. He reports on police, prisons and protests in the United States and the United States’ policing of the world. He previously reported for RT and Sputnik News.

Featured image is from MintPress News

Since 2014, the number of children arriving at the U.S. border has risen dramatically, as unaccompanied children, adolescents, and young families have fled gang and other forms of violence in the Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. In a new report, “There Is No One Here to Protect You: Trauma Among Children Fleeing Violence in Central America,” Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) presents the first case series of child and adolescent asylum seekers arriving in the United States, detailing their trauma experiences and resulting negative health outcomes. The report demonstrates the acute physical and psychological impact of domestic, gang, and gender-based violence on these children, as well as the failure of authorities in their home countries to provide effective protection or to prosecute abusers. The findings in this report and the relevant legal standards demand an effective and humane policy response both in countries of origin, to prevent the violation of child rights, and in the United States, to fairly recognize claims of persecution and end practices that expose these young migrants to further trauma.

The report is based on forensic evaluations of 183 individuals age 18 or under conducted by PHR’s Asylum Network, a national network of expert volunteer clinicians who evaluate individual cases of physical and psychological trauma from torture or persecution experienced by asylum seekers involved in U.S. immigration proceedings. The report’s findings identify the features of an escalating child rights crisis, from persecution in countries of origin to compounding trauma experienced by the children while in transit and at the U.S.-Mexico border.

“Children are being met at the U.S. border with harsh, punitive policies that both violate their rights and severely affect their wellbeing,” said Kathryn Hampton, PHR’s network program officer, who coordinates the Asylum Network. “U.S. immigration officials have justified such policies in the name of deterrence. However, if violence is a major factor driving children to seek refuge in the United States – as demonstrated by the people PHR’s clinicians evaluated, and whose cases were utilized for this study – harsh border enforcement will not serve as an effective deterrent and will only cause more harm to an already traumatized population.”

The report analyzes data from child and adolescent asylum seekers who recount experiences of extreme violence and sexual abuse at the hands of gangs, family members, and even law enforcement in their home countries. Children reported being forced to join gangs or be murdered, told to kill their families if they did not want to be killed by gang members, or forced to endure sexual assault at the hands of gang members or their own family members. With states’ consistent failure to protect children, investigate crimes, or prosecute or punish perpetrators, and the existence of both gang intimidation of police as well as gang infiltration into the police, the children expressed fear and lack of trust in local authorities.

One young woman “reports having been beaten all over her body including her head, being dragged through the woods, being tied to her friends, blindfolded and raped by multiple people.”

Among the children evaluated, the vast majority were from the Northern Triangle countries (89 percent). 78 percent of the children evaluated reported that they survived direct physical violence. Eighteen percent reported surviving sexual violence, 71 percent experienced threats of violence or death, and 59 percent witnessed acts of violence. This violence was most often gang-related (60 percent), but a significant portion of children (47 percent) faced violence perpetrated by family members. PHR’s clinicians documented negative physical aftereffects of this abuse, including severe head injuries and musculoskeletal, pelvic, and dermatologic trauma. More than three quarters (76 percent) of children were suspected to have or were diagnosed with at least one major mental health issue, including post-traumatic stress disorder (64 percent), major depressive disorder (40 percent), and anxiety disorder (19 percent). These statistics show that these children experience not only experience high rates of trauma, but often are subjected to multiple forms of trauma by multiple perpetrators. These results add additional context for the extraordinary suffering and abuse described in our qualitative findings.

PHR’s research shows that children arriving in the United States are fleeing severe forms of harm which may amount to persecution if their home government is unable or unwilling to control the perpetrators, and if their persecution is based on their race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. In accordance with international and U.S. law, people with a credible fear of persecution arriving at the U.S. border have the legal right to apply for asylum. Child asylum seekers are entitled to additional protections, including accommodations in the asylum process which consider their level of development and maturity and their specific health and mental health needs.

Dr. Joseph Shin, co-medical director of the Weill Cornell Center for Human Rights, said that obtaining asylum in the United States offered significant relief for children.

“Despite the extreme trauma these children have experienced, and the resulting developmental, psychological, and physical harm, many demonstrated remarkable resilience and significant physical and psychological improvement once they were safe from physical harm and had the opportunity to begin rebuilding their lives in the United States.”

The report includes comprehensive recommendations to U.S. government agencies, Congress, the governments of Northern Triangle countries, international refugee and migration bodies, and international bodies mandated to protect children’s rights.

PHR advises the U.S. administration to safeguard access to asylum in order to meet immediate protection needs of asylum seekers, as well as maintain aid to Northern Triangle countries to address gang-related violence, corruption, and impunity. PHR calls on the administration to ensure that all children receive pediatric medical screening on arrival and uphold child protection standards in custody, prioritizing least restrictive settings and increasing use of alternatives to detention. It is not safe for any child to be detained for longer than 24 hours in Customs and Border Protection holding cells. Children should be transferred to enhanced reception centers with access to appropriate medical care and other essential services, from which they should be released within 20 days as per the Flores settlement agreement.

PHR calls on the governments of El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico to ensure resources for violence prevention measures as well as resources to investigate, prosecute, and punish violent acts committed by state and non-state actors, while ensuring due process protections for the accused, and establishing or maintaining independent investigatory bodies to address corruption and impunity.

The remainder of the recommendations can be found in the report.

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Rare earths are essential to the production of high-tech and other products. China is the world’s leading producer by far. See below.

According to the US Geological Survey (USGS),

“(r)are-earth elements (REE) are necessary components of more than 200 products across a wide range of applications, especially high-tech consumer products, such as cellular telephones, computer hard drives, electric and hybrid vehicles, and flat-screen monitors and televisions,” adding:

“Significant defense applications include electronic displays, guidance systems, lasers, and radar and sonar systems.”

REEs are essential for the above products, devices, and systems to work. In the early 1990s, China accounted for 38% of world production, the US 33%, Australia 12%, India, Malaysia, and several other countries the remainder.

According to the USGS,

“in 2008, China accounted for more than 90 percent of world production of REEs, and by 2011, China accounted for 97 percent of world production.”

While these figures may be overstated, it’s clear that users of REEs are heavily dependent on China as a supplier, by far the world’s largest producer, refiner, and exporter.

According to China’s General Administration of Customs data, REE exports from January through May were 7.2% less than the comparable 2018 period.

In May, they were down 16% from the year ago period, the decline likely related to the Trump regime’s trade war with China, the US by far the world’s leading importer of these elements.

It produces around 20% of its REE needs, making it heavily dependent on imports gotten mainly from China.

According to US International Trade Commission figures, China supplied 59% of REE imports to American users in 2018. The USGS said China accounts for around 80% of US imports of rare earths.

Last week, a US Commerce Department report discussed measures Washington is taking to reduce its “strategic vulnerabilities” caused by dependence on imports of rare earths and other essential materials.

Secretary Wilbur Ross said the Trump regime “will take unprecedented action to ensure that the United States will not be cut off from these vital materials.”

Rare earths are abundant but hard to mine because they’re available as compounds and oxides, the process expensive and environmentally harmful.

According to the Pentagon’s Defense Logistics Agency’s Jason Nie, a material engineer, talks are being held with REE miners in Malawi and Burundi, an effort to reduce the dependence on China as a key supplier. Yet these countries can only supply a small portion of US needs.

Cutting off supplies to the US by China would be what analysts call Beijing’s “nuclear option.” It wants normal relations with the US and other nations — short of sacrificing its sovereign rights to achieve them.

It’s prepared to respond as it considers necessary to unacceptable Trump regime actions. Imposing 25% or higher duties on all Chinese exports to the US would be his nuclear option, what he threatened if Beijing doesn’t yield to his demands.

In late May, a Chinese economic planning agency official warned that

“if anyone were to use products that are made with the rare earths that we export to curb the development of China, then the people of (south Jiangxi province where rare earths are mined), as well as all the rest of the Chinese people, would be unhappy.”

Editor-in-chief of China’s Global Times Hu Xijin tweeted:

“Based on what I know, China is seriously considering restricting rare earth exports to the US. China may also take other countermeasures in the future” to retaliate if the Trump regime goes too far.

China considers REEs a strategic resource, most world users heavily dependent on the country as a supplier.

US policy toward China is all about containing the country economically, financially, technologically, and militarily, what Trump’s trade war aims to achieve, seeking US hegemonic control over its part of the world and everywhere else.

Wanting China’s sovereign rights subordinated to US interests is an objective doomed to fail. It risks confrontation if things are pushed too far.

The same goes for Russia and Iran. Washington’s aim for dominance over other nations, their resources and populations risks possible global war.

Major media ignore the greatest threat of our time, what could happen by accident or design.

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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Featured image is from NEO

The Supreme Federal Court (STF) judge, Gilmar Mendes, cleared for trial on Monday the request for freedom of former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, according to Brazilian media. 

The habeas corpus (HC) was presented by Lula’s defense last year when then-judge Sergio Moro accepted Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s appointment to lead the Justice Ministry. This time around it is expected that the request will be analyzed on Tuesday or June 25, by a Second Panel of the STF.

The procedure had already entered the agenda of the Supreme Court on December 2018, yet the trial was suspended on December 4 after Mendes requested a hearing. At the time of the halt, the score was two votes against Lula’s HC by rapporteur Edson Fachin and judge Carmen Lucia.

With the partial vote, and as the trial has been cleared, judges Mendes, Celso de Mello, and Ricardo Lewandowski still have to vote.

According to Brazilian journalist and analyst, Breno Altman, the result of the vote presented by Lula’s lawyers will be 2-2 tomorrow, with the decision falling on the hands of justice de Mello.

Another request for Lula’s release, which questions the performance of Lava Jato’s judge at the STJ, Felix Fischer, also entered the Supreme Court’s agenda on Tuesday.  Mendes asked for a judgment in the plenary session.

The recent update on Lula’s case comes a day later The Intercept Brazil published an extensive and hard-hitting expose on the alleged political motivations behind Operation Car Wash (Lava Jato) task force against the former president and the Worker’s Party (PT), as well as the unethical involvement of current Minister of Justice, Moro.

The documents were released in a three-part series where according to The Intercept, it is proven, based on leaked documents and Telegram messages between prosecutors and Moro that the “apolitical” and “unbiased” team spent hours internally plotting how to prevent the return to power by Lula and his party. As well as the lack of hard and documented evidence to establish a case against the former head of state. ​​

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The Gun Violence Archive is an online archive of gun violence incidents collected from over 2,500  law enforcement, media, government and commercial sources daily in an effort to provide near-real time data about the results of gun violence.

GVA is an independent data collection and research group with no affiliation with any advocacy organization.

Below are selected charts from the Archive.

For more information, access the complete archive.

Geographic Distribution

Incidents in 2019

Number of Deaths in 2019

Read more on gun violence, access the complete archive.

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It’s been almost 200 years since the US declared that it would allow no more European colonies in the western hemisphere. A 100 years later this was twisted into a declaration that Latin America is exclusively the US’s sphere of influence, giving it a self-proclaimed right to interfere in other countries’ affairs.

The ‘Monroe Doctrine’, as it was known, deservedly fell into disrepute. But under President Trump it’s been revived. John Bolton, his national security adviser, announced in April that ‘the Monroe Doctrine is alive and well’. In May, he went even further: ‘This is our hemisphere!’ he told reporters after the failed coup in Venezuela.

‘Troika of tyranny’

The new version of the doctrine gives it a further twist. Bolton now claims to stand in defence of ‘democracy, sovereignty, security, and the rule of law’, aiming to make the Americas ‘free’ from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. Of course, he’s the one who decides what ‘free’ means.

It won’t, for example, mean withdrawing support from a Honduran president who won a fraudulent election a year ago and runs one of the most repressive regimes in Latin America. Why? Because he is a Trump ally. No, Bolton intends to focus on what he calls the ‘troika of tyranny’: Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua, all the subject of sanctions because their heads of state are ‘the three stooges of socialism’ who look to Russia and China for support rather than the US.

So Trump has reversed most of the reforms initiated by Obama in US-Cuba relations, recognised an unelected head of state in Venezuela and blocked loans from international agencies for poverty-reducing projects in Nicaragua.

Of the three countries in Bolton’s ‘troika’ the oddest is Nicaragua. It has a president, Daniel Ortega, who won an election in 2016 recognised as fair by the Organization of American States; unlike its northern neighbours it barely contributes to the ‘migrant caravans’ that so annoy Trump and it effectively inhibits drug smuggling. Until a year ago it was also the safest country in the region.

Return of the Reaganites

What angers Bolton (and his special envoy Elliott Abrams) is Ortega himself. Bolton was part of the Reagan administration and helped to find ways to hide the funding of the ‘Contras’ that were attacking Nicaragua’s Sandinista government in the 1980s; Abrams was indicted for his role in covering up that scandal but was later pardoned by Reagan’s successor, President Bush. For both of them, a resuscitated Monroe Doctrine is not about freedom, it’s about getting rid of leftist governments.

Because this is what is at stake in Nicaragua. Ortega may have stretched the country’s constitution by standing for a third successive term of office, and he endorsed the ban on abortion, but even his enemies can’t deny that he’s systematically reduced poverty, has achieved the lowest inequality levels in Central America and fifth-highest ranking for the gender gap in the world according to the World Economic Forum, reduced illiteracy and increased life expectancy.

He ended the daily power cuts that occurred under his predecessor while doubling the proportion of homes that have electricity. Nicaragua is now one of eleven countries said to be leading the charge on renewable energy, aiming for its electricity supply to be 90 per cent renewable within the next year.

Settling old scores

Rather than pursuing freedom, it’s pretty obvious that Bolton and Abrams are settling historic scores. Ortega bounced back from electoral defeat in 1990, so now he’s denounced as a brutal dictator. Yet the US administration is targeting sanctions not just at Ortega himself but at the programmes funded by the World Bank and other agencies that have been part of his drive to end extreme poverty.

Far stranger than the Trump administration’s policies, though, is that they are encouraged by progressive media, international NGOs and a good proportion of leftist opinion in both the US and Europe. How has this come about?

Ortega’s opponents in Nicaragua itself have never mustered much support in elections. So for several years they’ve instead accepted US funding for programmes that ‘promote democracy’ but which instead undermine it. As the website Global Americans put it (it’s funded partly by the Reagan-established National Endowment for Democracy), they were ‘laying the groundwork for insurrection’.

When student protests took place in Nicaragua last April against government social security reforms, US-funded NGOs were ready to manipulate social media to make sure the unrest spread as quickly as possible. Not only did this succeed, but international media bought wholesale the stories of ‘peaceful’ protesters suffering government attacks.

This continued even when the ‘peaceful’ protesters set up roadblocks in major cities and highways and began to kidnap, torture and kill police and government supporters (providing the evidence via their own horrific social media posts). It took until mid-July for the government to regain control. The conflict produced 253 deaths, including 22 police, 31 protesters (half were students), 48 Sandinista supporters and 152 members of the public.

By then, whatever popular support the protesters had gained had been largely lost after people had experienced the violence of the roadblocks. Not only that, but after the leaders of the protest had demanded Ortega’s immediate resignation they travelled to the US where they were welcomed by rightwing Republicans like Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, and, of course, by the Trump administration itself.

Given the history of US intervention in Nicaragua, such tactics were doomed to cost the opposition much of their local support. Since last year, opposition protests have dwindled, the violence has largely ended and Nicaragua has returned to something like normality. Since February, a ‘national dialogue’ has resumed between government and opposition, which is steadily implementing a programme of reforms.

Last leftist standing

This is all well and good, but these developments are largely ignored by the international media and much of the Left. Headlines like The Guardian’s Ortega clings to power still appear even as a respected opinion poll showed he has support from 55 per cent of the population. Amnesty International campaigns for the release of those arrested in the protests while refusing to acknowledge that any were responsible for violence (such as the attack on a police station in Morrito on 12 July, which left five dead and in which nine were kidnapped).

Even New Internationalist, when it says that Nicaragua’s good guys have turned bad, refers to the Sandinistas but not to the opposition thugs who may have tortured them. Supporters of the protests who don’t live in Nicaragua have been blinded into thinking the opposition still has widespread support. It doesn’t. But the message that Ortega is a repressive dictator is music to the ears of Bolton, Abrams and the others who want to extinguish one of the few remaining leftwing governments in Latin America.

Correction: this article originally misstated John Bolton’s moniker for Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela; it is ‘troika of tyranny’, not ‘troika of terror’. 

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World War I is the gift that just keeps on giving. Although the U.S. government’s intervention into this senseless, immoral, and destructive war occurred 100 years ago, the adverse effects of the war continue to besiege our nation. Among the most notable examples is the Espionage Act, a tyrannical law that was enacted two months after the U.S. entered the war and which, unfortunately, remained on the books after the war came to an end. In fact, it is that World War I relic that U.S. officials are now relying on to secure the criminal indictment of Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks head who released a mountain of evidence disclosing the inner workings and grave wrongdoing on the part of the U.S. national-security establishment, especially with respect to the manner in which it has waged it undeclared forever wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan.

Some news media commentators are finally coming to the realization that if the Espionage Act can be enforced against Assange for what he did, it can be enforced against anyone in the press for revealing damaging inside information about the national-security establishment — i.e., the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA. Therefore, they are calling on the Justice Department to cease and desist from its prosecution of Assange.

Of course, they are right, but the problem is that they don’t go far enough. Their mindsets reflect the customary acceptance of the status quo. The mindset is that we Americans simply have to accept the way things are and plead with the government to go easy on us.

That’s just plain nonsense. It is incumbent on the American people to start thinking at a high level, one that doesn’t just accept the existence of tyrannical laws and instead calls for their repeal. After all, isn’t that what our Declaration of Independence says — that when government becomes destructive of the legitimate ends for which it was formed, it is the right of the people to alter or even abolish it and form new government?

What does that mean with respect to the Espionage Act? It means that the law should simply be repealed and that Americans need to start demanding repeal rather than simply pleading with the Justice Department to enforce it in a more judicious manner.

Let’s keep in mind that the law is the fruit of a rotten foreign intervention. Hardly anyone defends the U.S. intervention into World War I. That war was, quite simply, none of the U.S. government’s business. President Wilson, however, was hell-bent on embroiling the U.S. in the conflict. Wilson believed that if the force of the U.S. government could be used to totally defeat Germany, this would be the war to finally end all wars and to make the world safe for democracy.

Wilson’s mindset, of course, was lunacy. Sure enough, the U.S. intervention resulted in Germany’s total defeat, which was then followed by the vengeful Treaty of Versailles, which Adolf Hitler would use to justify his rise to power. Nazism and World War II soon followed. So much for the war to end all wars and to make the world safe for democracy. Tens of thousands of American men were sacrificed for nothing.

Moreover, Wilson had to force American men to fight in World War I. He conscripted them. Enslaved would be a better word. When a government has to force its citizens to fight a particular war, that’s a good sign that it’s a bad war, one that shouldn’t be waged.

In fact that was one of the reasons for the Espionage Act—not to punish people for spying but rather for criticizing the draft and the war. The law converted anyone who publicly criticized the draft or attempted to persuade American men to resist the draft into felons. And make no mistake about it: U.S. officials went after such people with a vengeance, doing their best to punish Americans for doing nothing more than speaking.

One example was Charles Schenck, who was prosecuted and convicted of violating the law after circulating a flier that opposed the draft. When the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, the Court upheld the conviction, one of the earliest examples of judicial deferment to the military, a deference that would become virtually complete after the U.S. government was officially converted to a national-security state after World War II.

Another example was Eugen Debs, who got convicted for criticizing the war and for encouraging men to resist the draft. President Wilson called Debs “a traitor to his country.”

How in the world can such prosecutions and convictions possibly be reconciled with the principles of a free society? Freedom necessarily entails the right to criticize government for anything, including its wars, its enslavement of people, its tyranny, and anything else. Perhaps it is worth nothing that both Schenk and Debs were socialists, something that today’s crop of Democrat presidential candidates might want to take note of.

Longtime supporters of FFF know that one of my favorite stories in history is the one about the White Rose, a group of college students in Germany who, in the midst of World War II, began distributing pamphlets calling on Germans to resist their own government and to oppose the troops. (See my essay “The White Rose: A Lesson in Dissent.” Also, see the great movie Sophie Scholl: The Final Days.) When they were caught and brought to trial, the members of the White Rose were berated by the presiding judge, who accused them of being bad German citizens and traitors, just as Wilson, the Justice Department, and the U.S. Supreme Court had said of Americans who were violating the Espionage Act.

Today, any U.S. official would praise the actions of the White Rose, but that’s just because it was foreign citizens opposing an official enemy of the U.S. government. The fact is that if the White Rose members had done the same thing they did in Germany here in the United States, U.S. officials would have gone after them with the same anger and vengeance as German officials did. And they would have used the Espionage Act to do it.

It’s time to acknowledge that the horror of U.S. intervention into World War I and the horrible consequences of that intervention. It’s also time to rid our nation of the horrific relic of that intervention, the Espionage Act. We need to continue  demanding the dismissal of all charges against Assange. But let’s not stop there. Let’s repeal the tyrannical World War I-era Espionage Act under which he is being charged to ensure that this cannot happen to others.

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Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. Send him email.

Featured image is from TruePublica

In the heart of one of the world’s oldest and richest democracies, the staff keeping government offices functional are forced to turn to food banks because they cannot afford to eat.

Cleaners at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) in London are unable to afford the bus to work. One worker was unable to give their wife transport money to take their sick son to the GP, forcing her to walk for ninety minutes; others have faced eviction over late rent.

“How can we live like this?”

“How will I feed my son?” asks one worker. “I have worked here 10 years and it has never been this bad. Some of my colleagues have been paid zero. Some have been paid only 40 hours when they worked 120 hours. One colleague is missing thousands of pounds and can’t travel to work. They promise they will pay and it keeps going and going. How can we live like this?”

This is not the first so-called payroll issue at International Service Systems (ISS), a huge facility service company for numerous multinationals and the government. The Communication Workers Union sounded alarms in February over ISS’ planned move from monthly to fortnightly pay, meaning housekeepers would have to wait a month to receive two weeks’ money, along with a pay review date which could mean no 2019 pay award at all for those transferring into the company. In April, three unions began separate protests as the scale of the problem became clearer; security guards at Barclay and Goldman Sachs and porters and caterers at NHS hospitals faced being left without pay as the system was ‘upgraded’. The problem has now rolled into the heart of government.

The new contracts with ISS state that workers will be paid every fortnight. However, this pay will not be for the fortnight just worked, but for the previous one. In practice, ISS withholds two weeks’ pay from the first month of work – because in this month workers are only paid for two weeks’ work. ISS offered bridging loans, but these are not enough: once they have been paid back (over four pay cycles – eight weeks) the workers are once again left with two weeks’ less pay than they are due. It also means that workers must repay the loan over a short period of time, reducing their take-home pay by up to £250 every fortnight.

“It’s now about moving from charity to solidarity”.

These are workers with little or no disposable income. “They work 60 hour weeks and still barely have anything”, says a union source inside BEIS. This month the cleaners – mostly Latin American and North African migrant workers – have been on strike, most of them, for the first time. They are calling for a living wage. When the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union organised the food banks, BEIS staff were supportive and gave generously, with many joining the union as well – although “no one from senior management donated”, the source says. “It’s now about moving from charity to solidarity, getting people to donate to the strike fund.”

“Media attention and outrage from civil servants in the department helped bring [management] to the table,” the source explains, “They’re holding out on paying a living wage, because as the department that sets the minimum they don’t want to admit that their policy is a failure. They’ve told us as much.”

Organisers’ next steps are to increase pressure on ISS and BEIS, and security staff are being balloted to join the strike. Management have offered an increase below the unions’ terms which they believe shows that opposition “is on purely ideological grounds.” Management have now agreed to meet workers, although the chaos engulfing government with Theresa May’s resignation poses strategic problems for the union.

In the time since outsourcing giant Carillion’s collapse, which cost thousands of jobs, even more outsourcing scandals have hit Whitehall. Cleaners at the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) – as well as Kensington & Chelsea Council (RBKC) – picketed in August last year against outsourcing giants Amey and OCS’ refusal to pay them the London living wage. In those cases both the MoJ and RBKC blamed the outsourcers, which is of course technically correct but disguises the structural reason outsourcers are hired; precisely so messy functions like industrial relations and responsibility for decent pay and conditions are farmed out to outsourcers. It is not merely services that are privatised; passing blame from the publicly accountable authority to the unaccountable corporate entity is part of the institutional arrangement. In this case, BEIS did not discuss the issuing of the contract with the PCS staff union, who learned after the contract had been signed that it did not include proper living wage provisions. PCS had a relevant recognition agreement – but ISS unilaterally stopped recognising the union just before problems began in earnest.

“The workers were powerless. Now they’re not.”

Organisations like ISS, which is currently planning to cut its workforce by 100,000, are concerned only with the bottom line. At the state’s end of the equation, the austerity drive to reduce ‘government waste’ and ‘red tape’ causes giants like Carillion to not merely cut corners, but offer costings that are out-rightly misleading and institutionalise an unsustainable business model. It’s not just a matter of an unscrupulous employer causing an incident that happens to, on this occasion, involve the civil service. It’s a consequence of a realignment of the relationship between market and state and the torpedoing of not only public services but public service delivery, in which the austerity regime has been only an instrument in pursuit of a broader plan to remake the economy in the interests of the few.

But on this occasion, the outsourcers may have pushed their workers too far. The ISS payroll dispute has contingently affected hugely disparate sections of organised labour. Large ‘conventional’ unions like Unite and the GMB union, middleweight and more militant unions such as the Rail, Maritime and Transport Union and PCS and small, flexible left unions like Independent Workers of Great Britain and United Voices of the World are all involved. It’s an important opportunity for collaboration between organisers working among marginal contract workers and the traditional heavily-unionised ranks of the public sector. “[The workers] were genuinely powerless and now realise they’re not”, says the BEIS source, who also praised the energy brought to the picket line, with music and attempts at making it a communal experience. He adds that Whatsapp groups have enabled lines of communication between workers that are being moved around rapidly. This includes rebutting disinformation, such as  one incident when a manager claimed that if more than seven workers joined a picket line they would incur legal action.

The BEIS workers understand what is happening in a broad sense.

“If they can do this inside a government department imagine what they can do outside government. I hope the minister can see this and be ashamed at what he is putting [us] through”, says one worker.

They have linked their missing payslips, their low pay and their intimidating management to the broader issue of outsourcing and are calling for BEIS to bring them back in house. If it is significant that this situation is taking place in the heart of our political institutions, it is equally significant that popular resistance is growing there too.

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The progress made on furthering the military dimension of Turkey’s multipolar grand strategy might be irreversible by this point after the US suspended the country from the F-35 training program and increased the odds that it’ll seek replacement warplanes from Moscow instead.

Acting Secretary of Defense Shanahan decided over the weekend to begin the phased suspension of Turkey’s participation in the F-35 training program after sending a letter to his counterpart detailing the steps that will be undertaken to finalize this process by the end of July, but then the US unexpectedly moved the schedule forward and reportedly banned Turkish pilots from flying these planes on Monday. It’s unclear why this abrupt change was made but it might be because the US figured that it’s better to begin removing Turkey from the program as soon as possible after Ankara made it clear that it won’t reconsider its earlier decision to purchase Russia’s S-400 air-defense systems, claiming that American analogues don’t satisfy its needs but that this doesn’t necessarily mean that it intends to worsen ties with the US.

The Pentagon obviously feel very differently about that and regards Turkey’s moves as threatening because it believes that the S-400s could endanger the F-35s that might fly over its notional NATO ally’s airspace. Therein lies the crux of the problem, however, because a serious security dilemma has begun to affect American-Turkish relations after the US started providing military support to Syrian Kurdish groups that Ankara regards as terrorists and then shortly thereafter was accused of being involved in the failed summer 2016 coup attempt against President Erdogan. Turkey can’t trust the US anymore, and purchasing Russia’s S-400s might be seen by it as an “insurance policy” for averting the worst-case scenario of American or allied airstrikes in the event that it goes to war with “fellow” NATO member Greece and/or Cyprus over disputed but reportedly energy-rich maritime territory.

There’s a suspicion that the US might be able to secretly reprogram any air-defense systems that it sells to Turkey to mask Greek, Cypriot, and its own own warplanes in the event of a conflict and therefore make them invisible to the defending forces, while Washington obviously couldn’t do this when it comes to the S-400s, hence why it’s so afraid of Ankara purchasing them. With Turkey on its way out of the F-35 program as punishment for its refusal to reconsider its agreement with Russia, it’s since been reported that it might go a step further in buying Su-57s from it as a replacement, which would make the progress that it’s achieved in the military dimension of its multipolar grand strategy irreversible by more closely tying it together with its northern Great Power neighbor.

The Russian-Turkish Strategic Partnership is therefore strengthening at the expense of the American-Turkish one, which is obvious to all objective observers and was made possible through Moscow’s deft application of “military diplomacy“, or in other words, its ability to peacefully leverage military means to advance diplomatic goals. In this instance, simply agreeing to meet Turkey’s military needs with the S-400s following its fallout with the US was enough to set into motion a larger chain of events that worked out to its grand strategic interests, though it must be remarked that Turkey is merely in the midst of this larger process and has yet to fully succeed with it. As such, the country is extremely vulnerable to externally provoked instability attempts designed to offset its “rebalancing” act, ergo the economic crisis of the past year for example.

Going forward, the military aspect of Turkey’s multipolar grand strategy appears to be a fait accompli, with the S-400 deal likely going down in history as a watershed moment for both Mideast geopolitics (due to the Russian-Turkish Strategic Partnership that it advanced) and NATO (seeing as how the aforementioned came at the expense of the American-Turkish one). It’s still theoretically possible that the US might pull out all the stops and resort to some Hybrid War trickery in a last-ditch attempt to either stop this process before it’s finalized or punish Turkey for its success, but the fact of the matter is that this might inadvertently lead to the further strengthening of the Russian-Turkish Strategic Partnership in response and the acceleration of what might now be Ankara’s irreversible pivot to the East.

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Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Never mind the slow but steady dismantling in the fabled West of the “welfare state”, that temporary horror the elites grudgingly used to tolerate. But that was only as a means of pacifying their subjects and winning over credulous hearts and minds in the competing socialist camp, while it still existed. To be fair, concern for public well-being never was an ideological item in the Western “value” system to begin with. It was dissimulated for a while merely as a tactical measure to confuse the masses. But one assumes that at least the various personal “freedoms” that Western countries used to be famous for indeed were an integral element of their political institutions, values deeply ingrained in their culture.

Canada is the latest champion of Western, trans-Atlantic values that is sending a clear message to the world that such assumptions are poppycock.

A major scrupulously legal assault on freedom of speech and conscience as well as scholarly research (and we are not talking here about the rampaging of informal terror squads such as Antifa) is in the works in Canada. A Srebrenica genocide denial law is coming up soon for parliamentary vote in Ottawa. It is being sponsored by MP Brian Masse ([email protected]) (image on the right). The pending bill is the result of a petition filed by a Bosniak lobby group in Canada, “Institute for genocide research.”

The “institute” is not known to have published a single serious and academically viable book or scholarly paper on any subject whatsoever, including Srebrenica. It is a comically misnamed ethnic pressure group financed, as usual, by mysterious patrons. But given the manufactured climate of opinion, unless this bill is strongly and competently opposed, there is little doubt about the outcome.

Here is some basic information about this parliamentary project, now known as Petition No. 421-03975, presented to the House of Commons on May 29, 2019: click here.

And here are the words of the sponsor, Brian Masse, at Canada’s House of Commons as he put the matter before his colleagues:

“Madam Speaker … the House unanimously declared April as ‘Genocide Remembrance, Condemnation and Awareness Month’ and named genocides, which have been recognized by Canada’s House of Commons, including the Srebrenica genocide.

“It is time for the government to extend resources to commemorate the victims and survivors of genocide, educate the public and to take specific action to counteract genocide denial, a pernicious form of hate which reopens wounds and reinvigorates division. Truth is justice; honesty is the path to reconciliation and peace.”

Just so that no one is taken in by this fine rhetoric, the geopolitical significance of Srebrenica (forget about truth, justice, reconciliation, and peace) should briefly be recalled. The alleged failure in July of 1995 of the  collective West to come to the rescue of 8,000 “men and boys” in Srebrenica was transfigured into the pretext for the “Right to protect” (R2P) doctrine. That fraudulent rationale was used for subsequent “humanitarian interventions” which wrecked and plundered at least half a dozen countries and cost about two million mostly Muslim lives.

But contrary to interventionist propaganda and the simplistic cant of politicians, always campaigning to attract a few more ethnic votes and to impress the political correctness brigade with their loyalty to the right causes, in the real-world there exist complex issues not given to simplistic reductionism. Srebrenica is one of them. (Also here,  here, and here.) To paraphrase Polonius, there are indeed “more things in heaven and earth, than are dreamt of by politicians,” eager to please special interests.

One of the major pertinent issues here, of course, is the factual question of what actually happened in Srebrenica. A staggering amount of research has been done on that subject that one supposes busy politicians, long out of school, may be excusably ignorant of. Canadian politicians in particular may be generously excused for not keeping up with  Srebrenica developments because their hands are presumably full sorting out genocides closer to home.

A fundamental issue that comes to mind straightaway, and voters anxious to protect their liberties might want to bring it to the attention of their parliamentary deputies, has to do with freedom of speech and conscience, not whether or not genocide occurred in Srebrenica. Section 2 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms rather unambiguously guarantees “freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication” as fundamental rights. May the supreme law of the land be taken at face value?

How do MP Masse and colleagues who are contemplating to vote for his “genocide denial” bill propose to reconcile its language with the liberties which are constitutionally guaranteed to all citizens of Canada (and presumably also to foreign nationals on Canadian territory)? Or with the fact that Canada is also party to international agreements which guarantee freedom of conscience and expression, such as the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights? Articles 18 and 19 of the Declaration, which deal with freedoms of thought, opinion, and expression should in particular be pondered by Canada’s lawmakers.

The ghastly thing about this is that the Srebrenica genocide denial law would not even change anybody’s mind about Srebrenica. But it would suppress (have a “chilling effect,” as they aptly put it in neighboring America) public discourse on the subject and would therefore constitute a serious infringement of Canadian citizens’ human rights. That is the issue of principle. All but zealous Balkan combatants should manage easily to agree on this much, and it ought to be gently stressed to befuddled Canadian legislators. A member of parliament is free to think whatever he or she wants about Srebrenica, with or without adequate information on the subject, including that it was genocide. But for Canadian citizens of all stripes and backgrounds, including those who happen to be legislators, their fellow-citizens’ freedom of expression should take absolute priority over the agenda of a Balkan lobby. A legislator who sincerely thinks that Srebrenica was genocide can and should still vote against Petition no. 421-03975 on freedom of speech and conscience grounds alone. Assuming that  those values matter in countries that boastfully claim to have copyrighted them.

It so happens that the aforementioned bogus “Institute for genocide research” has a record of attempts at free speech suppression, targeting those who think differently about its pet projects. In 2011 the “institute” made an unsuccessful attempt to steer a Srebrenica genocide denial law through the Canadian parliament. “Institute” scholars then took their revenge on American-Serbian professor Dr. Srdja Trifkovic, preventing his entry into Canada to deliver a lecture in Vancouver by falsely alleging to immigration authorities that he was a dangerous hatemonger, or something to that effect. The incident at the time was amply covered by Global Research. Prof. Trifkovic fought the spurious allegation against him energetically in Canadian courts and won. The upshot of it was that Canadian taxpayers lost considerable treasure in a wasteful judicial confrontation instigated by agenda-driven lobbyists.

The proposed law, be it mentioned in passing, is also manifestly discriminatory in relation to the Canadian-Serbian community. Considering the cultural role of spitefulness (inat is the native word) in the region that the lobbyists come from, that may well be its true and ultimate inspiration. Is there a single Canadian Serb who thinks that what occurred in Srebrenica was genocide? The proposed law would nevertheless have a discriminatory effect on the ability of members of the Canadian Serbian community, as such, to enjoy the freedom of expression guaranteed to them and to all Canadians by Canada’s constitution. As Canadian Serbs, they would be obliged to either maintain public silence about an issue they regard as being of vital interest to their nation and community or, were they to speak up in accordance with the dictates of their conscience, to face criminal prosecution. So much for all the “Atlantic Charters” and their associated “freedoms.”

Canadian legislators should ponder the fact that Canada does not have a Holocaust denial law protecting the dignity of six million victims, yet its parliament is contemplating a massive curtailment of its citizens’ civil rights in a matter involving 8,000 unverified deaths. That is a degradation and in-the-face mockery of the pain of the Jewish community. But it gets even worse, or tragicomic if one prefers. In its Tolimir judgment in 2012, the vaunted Hague Tribunal ruled that the killing of three individuals in the nearby enclave of Zepa (which is part of the same conceptual package with Srebrenica) constituted genocide (Trial Judgment, Par. 1147 – 1154). That was allegedly because those individuals were endowed with such extraordinary importance within the community of Zepa that, as a result of their demise, the community was rendered unviable, hence subjected to genocide. The point is that denying this absurd and tortuously reasoned finding of the Hague Tribunal concerning Zepa (a place that assuredly no member of the Canadian parliament had ever even heard of) by operation of the projected genocide denial law would also subject the careless speaker who took his rights seriously to criminal liability. That is the absurd level to which the “genocide denial” rhetoric has degenerated.

As an American citizen, this writer is quite prepared to stand in any public square in Canada and to proclaim that Srebrenica was not genocide. It would in fact be a pleasure to be detained by Her Majesty’s authorities in order to accomplish a lofty civic purpose that should benefit all Canadians. The resulting proceedings would ultimately enhance Canada’s judicial culture by testing the constitutionality of this legal travesty before the Canadian supreme court.

In the immortal words of Diana Johnstone, the “denial” of Srebrenica “genocide” is sufficiently justified by the fact that it is not true. The Srebrenica lobby and its eager acolytes in Canada’s Federal Parliament in Ottawa should grow up and accept that.

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This article was originally published on Srebrenica Project.

Stephen Karganovic is president of “Srebrenica Historical Project,” an NGO registered in the Netherlands to investigate the factual matrix and background of events that took place in Srebrenica in July of 1995.

The hit film of 2018 was Peter Farrelly’s Green Book. The film takes place in 1962, and was based on a true story about an Italian American bouncer, from the famous Copacabana NYC nightclub, securing a temporary job as the chauffeur/bodyguard for a popular black musician. He is needed because the trio anchored by the star is going on a tour of the Midwest and Deep South.

Despite some overdone stereotypes of NYC Italian American families, the film captures the dark mood of racism in our country, especially in the South. Those not old enough to recall the extent of this racism of that time, the film delivers 100000%! In the beginning of the movie we also see a ‘touch’ of the Anti Semitism of that day (and now too) when an Italian mob boss refers to the owner of the Copa, Jewish American Jules Podell, as a ‘Jew bastard’. Sadly, prejudice did and does flow from one ethnic group towards others. Those who run this empire count on that to keep with their age old plan to ‘Divide and Conquer’ the working stiffs they control. “Keep them hating each other and they’ll forget about hating us so much.”

During their trip down south, the pair gets stopped one night during a heavy rain by two local cops. With guns drawn the older of the two deputies shouts to the driver, Tony Lip, to get out of the car in the pouring rain. He then yells to his partner to get the passenger, the black musician, out also. The young deputy states that there is no need to have the passenger get out, but is shouted down by his partner. As  Doc Shirley, the musician, and Tony Lip are standing in the monsoon, Tony Lip asks the deputy why they were pulled over. He is told, at gunpoint, that there is a ‘Sundown’ rule in that town which forbids ‘Niggras’ from being out past sundown. The deputy questions why Tony Lip is driving a ‘Niggra’ and what they are doing in his town. When the deputy finds out that Tony Lip is Italian he tells Tony that by being  Italian he is ‘Half a Niggra’, whereupon Tony Lip floors him with one punch… and the pair are arrested.

The film captures the extent of Jim Crow segregation at that time. The black star is treated with flattery by the places he is hired to perform in. Yet, he is not allowed to use the bathrooms reserved for whites, or to eat in the regular dining room. His dressing room is really just a closet compared to those he would use up north. Or course, heaven forbid if he were to stay in anything but rundown ‘Colored Only’ hotels. This all is a revelation to someone like Tony Lip, yet he himself begins to realize the ‘subtle segregation’ and obvious racism that had always existed in his own Bronx neighborhood. Both men slowly draw closer to each other through this horrific experience.

There are various levels to this great film. What attracted this writer was the message, as covert as it may have been, that all working stiffs are really just ‘Niggras’ to those who run things. No matter how much prestige or monetary gain one has accumulated, if one is NOT born and bred within the blue blooded club… acceptance is futile. The movers and shakers of empire will co-opt the few who climb that ladder of accomplishment, yet never allow them to eat in their upper class dining room. This Anglophile system has been with us since perhaps our inception as a republic. They allow the other ethnic ‘servants of empire’ to do just that. Behind all the Jews of finance and banking, Dagos, Micks, Krauts, Spics and Niggras in politics, the military, media, sports, hi tech, agriculture and manufacturing are the descendants of royalty who have always run things Amerikan.  They pull the strings of this phony ‘Two Party/One Party’ system, and always have. A scene in Robert De Niro’s film The Good Shepherd echoed this fact. When Matt Damon, as the Blueblood CIA man, pays a visit to the Joe Pesci character, playing a mafia leader, Pesci asks “We Italians we got our families and we got the Church, the Irish got their homeland, the Jews their tradition, even the Niggers they got their music… what do you people have?” Damon answers him “The United States of America and the rest of you are just visitors.”

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Philip A Farruggio is a contributing editor for The Greanville Post. He is also frequently posted on Global Research, Nation of Change, World News Trust and Off Guardian sites. He is the son and grandson of Brooklyn NYC longshoremen and a graduate of Brooklyn College, class of 1974. Since the 2000 election debacle Philip has written over 300 columns on the Military Industrial Empire and other facets of life in an upside down America. He is also host of the ‘It’s the Empire… Stupid‘ radio show, co produced by Chuck Gregory. Philip can be reached at [email protected].

India capitulated to American pressure and complied with the anti-Iranian sanctions regime, yet Iran keeps begging it to reconsider and continue investing in the Islamic Republic anyhow, with its humiliating behavior revealing just how desperate it is for economic relief during these tough times.

US sanctions got India to ditch Iran as its second-most important energy partner last month and an unnamed official just told one of his country’s leading media outlets that New Delhi’s position isn’t going to change “anytime soon“, yet some Iranian officials have yet to accept this reality and are practically grovelling before Modi to get him to reconsider. This humiliating behavior was on full display over the weekend after Minister of Petroleum Bijan Zangeneh’s latest statements on the issue, which practically amount to begging and reveal just how desperate Iran is for economic relief during these tough times. Here’s what he said regarding India’s tacit refusal to develop the Farzad B gas field, as reported by the official SHANA Petro Energy Information Network:

“We gave them great concessions… but it seems that the Indians have not signed any contracts for developing the field because of the sanctions. Iran considers India as a strategic partner and an old and reliable friend, but they did not sign a contract for developing Farzad B gas field for any reason, so if they do not indicate their readiness to develop the field after a certain period of time we will have to prepare the licensing round for having the field developed by an Iranian contractor … and have the project bankrolled by dipping into the National Development Fund of Iran. Iran’s relations with China and India are strategic ones and we can not influence our relations with these countries only because of a project; we must definitely negotiate with the Indians about Farzad B and declare to them that we cannot wait anymore. We do not want to challenge the relations between Iran and these countries, even if the sanctions are lifted, we are ready to sign a deal with Indians for Farzad B development project and continue this plan.”

From the above, it can be seen that Iran still considers India to be a “strategic partner” despite its recent betrayal. The Islamic Republic is also apparently very sensitive about offending the Indians and giving them the face-saving pretext to discontinue further cooperation as a result, which is why Zangeneh is so careful to say that the likely failure of this joint project won’t affect his country’s ties with New Delhi. To add self-inflicted insult to injury, he then reaffirms that Iran is ready to sign a deal with India if the sanctions are lifted, basically accepting that New Delhi will continue complying with Washington’s will and evidently having no problem with that at all. Instead of moving on and finding other partners like any other country would normally do in this case, Iran is obsessed with winning back India, which — to channel the unnamed Indian official quoted earlier — is unlikely to happen “anytime soon”.

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This article was originally published on Eurasia Future.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

The standard line is that the dominant powers in the world are democracies governed ‘of the people, by the people, for the people.’ Yet, we see that the important decisions are made by a relative handful of global elites by global elites, for global elites.

Indeed, according to Oxfam International, in January 2017 just 8 men own as much wealth as the bottom half of humanity. More than half of the world’s wealth is controlled by only 1 percent of the population, with the top 30 percent of the world population controlling more than 95 percent of global wealth. Today, there are as few as 17 asset management firms overseeing over $41 trillion in capital investment.

This extreme concentration of economic power is resulting in a crisis of humanity, with consequences on societies and on the natural world. Extreme inequality is leading to the rise of right-wing popular insurgencies and neo-fascist uprisings. Wars, military activity, and mass surveillance is taking hold, all in the name of keeping the world safe for these same capitalist elites to continue their activities. Meanwhile, unchecked climate change, overwhelming resulting from the activities of a small number of corporations, is threatening the survival of the human species.

These observations and others are documented in a new book by Peter Phillips, entitled, Giants: The Global Power Elite. Following years of painstaking research, Professor Phillips names the names of the asset management firms and the personalities on their Boards of Directors that are making the big decisions affecting the billions of planetary inhabitants. In the book’s concluding chapter, the author puts our a call to arms, demanding this powerful minority radically alter the course of their operations before it’s too late.

Professor Peter Phillips is a professor of sociology at Sonoma State University since 1994. He served as Director of Project Censored from 1996 to 2010. The following interview was conducted for the Global Research News Hour radio program with host Michael Welch on June 5, 2019, just days after the conclusion of this year’s Bilderberg Conference in Montreux, Switzerland.

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Global Research: Peter, you served as director of Project Censored for almost 15 years and have continued to be actively involved in media analysis and media literacy. What is the bridge between that work and your current research into the global power elite?

Peter Philips: Well, I’ve always been interested in elites. My political sociology Ph.D. focused on elites in the US, and I did my dissertation on the Bohemian Club. And, following from that was the idea that elites, you know, have an ideological hegemony that the corporate media reflects and continues to propagate worldwide. So Project Censored was a natural fit in terms of covering stories that the corporate media didn’t cover, and then looking at how Chomsky and Herman laid out the propaganda model of corporate media over 20 years ago and really have emphasized that. And so, it was a natural fit, and since not being director I’ve got back directly to more focusing on the elites themselves. How power works in the world.

GR: So, let’s focus on those elites then. Your book, Giants: the Global Power Elite revolves around a construct you refer to as the Transnational Capitalist Class. Could you specify exactly what distinguishes this Transnationalist Capitalist Class from what we traditionally think of as the business class, or the ruling class?

PP: Well, C Wright Mills used the terminology in his book The Power Elite back in the 50s, and he was saying that there were circles of higher powers people interconnected, who knew each other, the elites of government, the elites of business, military. And the 60s brought about a lot of research from sociologists on how the power elite networks worked in the United States. And so, we had a number of works, and I think one of the most prominent was Who Rules America by Bill Domhoff, William Domhoff University of California Santa Cruz.

Following from that there was the crisis, a profit crisis in terms of corporations making money in the 70s. And we saw hyperinflation, we saw the Carter Administration get engaged in trying to offset the high unemployment rates, things like that. There was what’s been called the Great U-turn. And in order to continue high profits, we began to see capital and corporations globalize.

So, corporations were going offshore, they were finding cheaper labor worldwide, still bringing products back to the United States to sell, but they took on a global scope. And with that, you start to see folks in Europe, Japan, and US, Canada, getting to be involved in business on a greater scale and more regularly. So, there’s a concentration of wealth that starts to accumulate. It’s not just the US, it’s global. And people in the top one percent get richer and richer every year, and the remaining people in the world, particularly the bottom eighty percent have seen a decline. So, we’ve got eighty percent of people in the world live on less than 10 dollars a day now, half live on less than 3 dollars a day.

So there’s this crisis of inequality that’s been building since the 70s, continues to be, wealth continues to be concentrated, and our research focused on who’s in charge of all that wealth. We’re talking trillions and trillions of dollars of capital that’s mobile and can be invested anywhere in the world.  So these giant capital investment companies like BlackRock, and Vanguard, and JP Morgan Chase, and Allianz, and UBS, are worldwide and can control mass amounts of money.

We looked in 2017 at the trillion-dollar investment management companies. There were 17 of them then. And they collectively hold 41 trillion dollars worth of wealth that they were managing. So it wasn’t just these individual…. just the company’s wealth, it was the top one percent of the world takes their excess capital and gives it to investment management companies to get returns on.

So, these were billionaires and millionaires, that put their money into these companies, and the 17 companies had 199 directors. so that’s who we researched, who these people were. They, today, control over 50 trillion dollars of wealth in the world and it’s a small number of people. And they have very similar backgrounds. They’re all high public educations, private colleges, and wealthy, but they know each other. So there’s this network of higher circles of people that are now global. And they get together in places like Davos, and the Bohemian Grove, and other places socially, and they interact and they have institutions now that are global, and the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Bank Of International Settlements, I mean there’s a number of institutions that facilitate interaction between the global elite.

GR: These two hundred directors, maybe give us a little bit more about the characteristics they have in common, and some of the… to the detrimental consequences that that skewed perspective may be having.

PP: Well the detrimental consequences are many. And that’s increased wealth by the few, which impacts the rest of the world. Thirty thousand people a day are dying from starvation in the world. That’s UN figures. And there’s more than enough food to feed everybody. Most of it’s thrown away. It’s not profitable to sell. Those are decisions that capital is making, because capital wants a return. Or the people that are holding the capital, they want an annual return, so they’re compelled to invest in a place that will give them a return. They have this 50 trillion dollars now of wealth that’s floating capital, literally, they can put anywhere they want, and the problem is they’ve got more capital than they’ve got places to put it to get an adequate return, in the three to ten percent range.

So, that’s a big problem, and they end up doing speculative investments like the subprime mortgage loans back in 2008, and that collapsed, that almost collapsed the entire world economic system and required trillions of dollars of bailout money from government going to central banks worldwide. The…that is continuing, so… Wealth continues to concentrate, there aren’t adequate places to put it, so the second option for capital is to try to buy up the resources of the world. Water rights, land control, mineral rights, freeway systems, whatever they can that it’ll get a return on. So there’s a privatization process that’s ongoing that impacts all of us.

And the third way massive amounts of wealth are used up and to give a return to this concentrated wealth is war, permanent war in the world today. And the US of course taking the lead in terms of military spending, but, you know, the NATO involvements… It’s a US-NATO empire with 800 to 1000 bases worldwide trying to control and protect global capital. That’s what it’s about.  It’s not about protecting the homeland or protecting US citizens overseas unless there’s a capital threat. So the military empires of the world is the police force for protecting this concentrated 50 trillion dollars worth of capital that’s managed just by these few hundred people.

GR: Of course, you’re referring there to the, what in a chapter you called ‘The Protectors’. Can you talk a little bit more about how those protectors maintain a loyalty to the aims of these global forces elites, as opposed to the governments of nation-states, such as the United States or the United Kingdom?

PP: Well the nation-states, the capitalist nation-states, and that’s Europe, US, Canada, Japan, and other capitalist countries around the world, where the elites are controlling it, the capital elites, are in the service of protecting global capital. That’s what governments do. So, if you look at Trump’s behaviour, or Obama’s behaviour, in terms are protecting global capital, they both did that, they’re both protecting Wall Street. They’re both trying to make sure that the investment cancel worldwide, they’re protected and  there can be returns for the wealthy, including themselves, of course. Obama has millions of dollars invested in investment management companies, and so does Trump. So, you know, that’s part of world agenda of protecting.

So, intelligence agencies, the Pentagon, you know, the CIA of course, … British intelligence, German intelligence, they all know that the agenda for the government is to protect the capital, and protect this concentration of wealth, … make sure that governments in other parts of the world don’t interfere with capital return. So not only they’re debt collectors, but they’re also regime changers so that there’s a government that is not cooperating with this global capitalist investment, such as Gaddafi in Libya was trying to create his own currency based on gold and Africa and the other countries go along with it, that wasn’t going to be tolerated. So they initiated, you know, a regime change there and (inaudible.)

Essentially that happened with Saddam Hussein as well. I mean he started selling his oil in Euros instead of dollars. That did him in.

GR: Of counrse you als-…

PP: So, that’s the focus, is protecting this global capital.

GR: Could you speak a little bit more to that … privatized aspect of the protecting…

PP: Of security? Absolutely! G4S is the second largest private employer in the world behind Walmart. They have 625,000 employees worldwide. And they do everything from guarding banks to running prisons to actual mercenary work in various countries, that, you know, killing people. And intelligence work, private intelligence work. So, the overlap between private intelligence and military that have almost merged together. Major part of the intelligence agencies in the United States are privatized, and are doing private work and the employees are not governmental. So, G4S is just a front runner, so to speak – the largest private military source in the world outside of government, and armies, and that.

So, they’re the ones who had the dogs up there in the Dakotas attacking the pipeline protesters there. They’re involved everywhere in the world, including protecting settlements in Israel. So, it’s a massive company.

Blackwater’s similar, it’s now called ‘Academi’. They run mercenary armies and Erik Prince has been trying to convince Trump that Blackwater should take over managing the resistance forrces in Afghanistan – or the resistance against the resistance forces. So…it’s global. It’s private. It’s deadly. And um, we’re seeing that expand and grow….I mean to use the word fascism is not inappropriate.

GR: These companies, they’re being invested in by these major investment firms, and major corporations. They’re all invested in each other and therefore there are all a lot of mutual interests that are being had as well.

PP: The 50 trillion is just one big cluster of co-investment. Um, the 17 giants have over 400 billion – that’s just the NASDAQ figures – invested in each other. And then all the others what I call mirror giants, and there’s actually three new companies that were over a trillion dollars in the last two years, and then there’s many that are …500 billion or 800 billion, and you start putting all this together, it’s this giant cluster of capital growth and expansion, managed by just these few hundred people, protected by governments worldwide – capitalist governments – and their military and intelligence agencies work on behalf of these elites.

So, that’s the ballga-, I mean, that’s the overall perspective. It’s not good for the world, it’s not good for democracy, and it’s certainly not good for people in countries where they are – have limited resources, are unable to grow or expand. It’s all taken up. It’s all controlled and bought out. So, that’s a catastrophe for the world and of course it’s the main cause of the environmental disasters that are ongoing. It’s also – there’s less than 70 companies in the world that produce four fifths of the global, um, warming gases that – it’s a major concentration of wealth and power. It’s transnational. These people get together and they have planning agencies like the Trilateral Commission and the Council of 30 that are private groups that basically set agendas for governments to implement.

GR: Could I get you to elaborate more on that precise policy-making role that those facilitators are putting together for the global power elite?

PP: Well, the Bilderberg is a group of about a hundred and – a hundred to a hundred and fifty. They had like a hundred and ten people last weekend in Montreux in Switzerland. Eighteen of the people listed in my book attended last weekend. Uh, but they’re not there setting policy. They’re there setting – building consensus and – where they can go back to their institutions that they – and they implement this consensus building.

So the topics covered last weekend were climate, the precariat, China, Russia, concerns there, stability in the market, I mean those are things that these highest level people are having conversations about, and they go back to the various institutions with the agreements and understandings that they’ve reached at these meetings.

The biggest one is the Trilateral Commission, which is over four hundred people from forty nations who meet regionally and internationally, and it’s all private. There’s no government officials involved whatsoever. They put out reports that are seen as guides to the White House, to the Pentagon, to the State Department as to where we need to go and what we need to do. The Trilateral Commission was the outspurt of … you know that Rockefeller put together, and Brzezinsky after they went to Bilderberger in the early 70s. And they said, ‘well this is cool. We need to do this here in the US’ and they started the Trilateral Commission.

The Council of 30 is the top bankers to the world’s social bankers and economists. So there’s actually thirty-two people – thirty-one men, one woman. They added a second woman this past year. And they’re based in Washington D.C.. And we call them the executive committee of global capitalism. They literally are the facilitators. When the Council of 30 puts out a report or a policy recommendation, the head of the World Bank or the IMF sees that as instructions. That’s the direction that we need to go.

So these are very important, privately funded, non-governmental policy groups that elites in the world utilize to set agendas and point their whole machine in the direction they want it to go.

GR: Could you give us, maybe, a real world example of one of these areas where they built a consensus and then you’re seeing it enacted on the world stage?

PP: Well, I think a good current example is united global capitalist countries against Venezuela. Maduro, of course, was elected by the people there. The socialist party has been in power for over twenty years. The government – US is there working very hard to try to have a regime change to undermine that. There’s certainly a consensus that that large pool of private – of oil should be privatized, and the resources in Venezuela invested in, where the return can go to global capital. That’s understood. They have been kind of trying to make that recommendation.

But then, to go and recognize the head of the Assembly as the actual president, was kind of an outstanding move. Certainly violated sovereignty of their country. But then we see who lines up. It’s the US, Canada, Germany, France, Great Britain. The capitalist countries line up in support of that regime change are the key players in controlling this global capital. So it’s an agenda of protecting and expanding opportunities for global capital to grow and expand.

The media, of course, goes right along with that, and uh – you know, the corporate media. The big television stations and the big newspapers are all calling for change there or even making statements about Maduro being a dictator and controlling that, I mean it’s just absolutely not true. And so there’s this agenda there that I thought was very obvious that I wrote about it recently.

The other place is that six years ago – uh five years ago, the Atlantic Council which is another big policy-making group made up of NATO nations, put out a report literally calling for regime change in Russia. Putin is very aware that the West would like to see him removed, and that opening up Russia to greater opportunities for investment and capital growth. I mean, you know global capital is just salivating over the opportunity … oil, gas, gold and minerals that are available in Russia, and they would love to have greater access to those investments.

GR: Now you’re getting to the other instrument that you mention in the book – the ‘Ideologists’ – when you mention the Atlantic Council. Basically they play an indoctrinating role, putting out the narratives that put governments, local media, educational institutions, the general public on the same page. Could you give us …. some examples of the specific companies that we’re talking about, and some of what they’ve been doing?

PP: Well, the top big media companies – MSNBC, and FOX, and CNN, and ABC, and that … they’re part of the global news system. They are invested in by all the major giants in very huge ways. In fact, I was just looking up ABC the other day, because when they were translating my book into spanish … there was a typo in there about who was invested in the various private – privately owned media company. At ABC, we had UBS from Switzerland – one of the giant investment companies in the world – we had them at nine hundred million. But then there was a second listing for UBS at six hundred million so they wrote me, ‘which one is it? Which one is it?’ So, I went back and I looked and, you know … UBS is currently invested in just ABC I think: 1.8 billion. So they doubled what had been nine hundred million just two years ago.

So, these giants – these big investment companies – are heavily invested in global media and all of television, radio, newspapers, you know the biggest information sources for most people in the world – are invested in by the giants and having an ideological agenda of protecting capitalism, and concentrated wealth. I mean that’s a given.

Now their content which is also really important is increasingly made – put together by public relation firms – giant public relation firms: Omnicom, Inter Public Group – and they are in turn producing probably close to eighty percent of all the news content in the world. So, a story about what’s at stake, what’s happening in any country, or what’s happening in the Middle East, is packaged by one of these public relation firms, given to corporate media and literally runs as presented.

So, there’s – all news is managed, and what you get on television news is, you know, local murders, and the freeway accidents, and the weather. Uh, the rest of it is essentially coming from public relation firms that have already packaged the news story to reflect the ideology that global capitalism wants to see.

GR: I notice you seemed to put out an open letter signed by ninety colleagues that’s directed to the elites themselves. Could you argue, you know, that, uh, about that – that approach. I mean, you seem to be wanting to harness a lot of, uh, public mobilizations but at the same time you seem to be willing to engage these global elites on a respectful level. Could I get you to…

PP: Well, I think we have to engage them directly, and that’s part of writing the book is to identify who they are, uh, ‘cause all these people have email addresses, and places of business, and they can be reached. And it can be impactful to them… They have children and grandchildren, and they’d like to see their grandchildren have grandchildren – a continuation of that. And the world environmentally and economically is in danger of collapse…You know there’s a very serious consequences that are going to come down from continued concentration of wealth, including civil unrest, and wars, and violence, and then overt repression by the military empire that could grow into massive civil unrest and disobedience. If it goes in that direction there could be environmental wars and catastrophes for major parts of the people in the world.

We’re in a dangerous situation and continued concentration of wealth and global warming, environmental practices are just … make that worse. And it’s that concentration of the desire of wealth to gain more wealth that is causing this as part of the structure. So we’re telling elites that they’re going to have to share.

GR: Okay.

PP: You know, they believe that by growth, that it’ll trickle down, and the whole world will be saved, and that’s not happening. It’s going actually in the opposite direction in a very big way and very quickly. And, we’re faced with extinction. So, there are movements like the Extinction movement, and Occupy, and a number of Labor movements in China, civilian movements throughout Europe, the Yellow Vest movement in France, that are all challenging, basically global power structures…

So the elites either need to share and change their behaviour in very big ways, in terms of what global capital is doing, or they’re going to be faced with economic and environmental collapse. So, having said that, we’re saying ‘okay, let’s do something about that. Let’s work together.’ And they’re certainly – they know that. I mean, that’s part of what was on the agenda at Davos was last weekend – I mean, last year in January, and then Bilderberger last weekend. You know, ‘what are we going to do about this crisis?’ And so there are certainly some that are aware of the situation and want to make some adjustments.

We have to pressure them. Social movements have to pressure them to act on those beliefs on those understandings in major ways. And that’s how we end up. And we of course, cite the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a value base … for any social movement to assume that we need to have those human rights as the focus of where we are going in the world.

GR: Yes, an essential touchstone. Professor Peter Phillips it’s been delightful to speak with you. Thanks so much for agreeing to appear on our program.

PP: Well, Michael I really appreciated it. Thank you very much!

Fierce clashes have been ongoing in northern Hama since June 6 when Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, Jaysh al-Izza, the Turkish-backed National Front for Liberation (NFL) and their allies launched an advance on Syrian Arab Army (SAA) positions there.

Initially, militants seized several positions, including Jibeen and Tal Meleh, but then the SAA re-grouped and launched a counter-attack stopping the further militant advance. According to pro-government sources, the recently deployed reinforcements from the 5^th Assault Corps, the 3^rd Armoured Division and 7^th Armoured Division as well as support of the Syrian Air Force and the Russian Aerospace Forces played a role in this counter-attack.

The pro-opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) said that at least 102 militants and 126 pro-government fighters have been killed in the clashes. Both these numbers seem to be overestimated. Nonetheless, if they are even partially true, these are the most intense clashes in the area over the past few months.

On June 9, units of the NFL and the al-Qaeda-affiliated coalition of militant groups, Wa Harid al-Muminin, attacked SAA positions near Turkish border in northern Lattakia. A source in the SAA told SouthFront that the attack, which began in the early hours of the morning, was launched from Turkish territory. The source said that vehicles armed with heavy machine guns supporting the militants were moving on the border line. A salvo of rockets was also launched from the direction of southern Turkey.

Sources close to the NFL and Wa Hariiid al-Muminin claimed that over 50 troops were killed in the attack. Nonetheless, this number remains unconfirmed by any photo or video evidence.

The NFL was formed last August by several Turkish-backed groups after direct pressure from Ankara. Wa Harid al-Muminin was established around the same time by al-Qaeda-affiliated Jamat Ansar al-Islam, Horas al-Din, Jabhat Ansar al-Islam and Ansar al-Tawhid.

Meanwhile, militants started using man-portable air-defense systems (MANPADs) against aircraft supporting the SAA.

On June 7, a Syrian warplane was hit by a surface-to-air missile over northern Hama. A military source told SouthFront that a Syrian Su-22M4 fighter bomber was hit with a MANPAD, but the damaged jet landed in a unspecified airbase in Homs. The pilot survived.

On June 8, the Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham news network claimed that a L-39 jet of the Syrian Air Force was targeted by a unspecified air-defense weapon while conducting a sortie over Greater Idlib. However, pro-government sources denied these claims.

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Claire Edwards talked about 5G last February in Poland.

Now more than ever, it is necessary to know the advantages and disadvantages of the said technology.

First we are told that 5G in space will help mitigate global warming – climate change. And we are told that it will help with health issues. We’re told that 5G in space will provide services to aircraft, both military and commercial.

But above all, it seems to me, on looking at the documents, that actually this is all about control. It’s about controlling what people do in “smart” cities.

It’s about monitoring and controlling agriculture. It’s about controlling what people do at sea – for example, overfishing.

So it’s a control agenda.

Which companies are the main players in this? Here you have a list of the five main companies.

And the plan is to put over 20,000 satellites in space to beam 5G over the entire planet. The Iridium company – they already have their 66 satellites. They went up last year. But my understanding is that first they need to establish the ground stations so these are not operating yet.

And yesterday you may have heard that the OneWeb company launched six satellites last night [27 February 2019]. And these are only part oftheir proposed constellations so these will also not be operating yet. And I see that – for OneWeb – one rocket will launch 35 satellites at a time.

So I imagine that it will take several months – even 16 months before they have enough satellites for them to start operating with 5G. At least I hope so.

English with consecutive translation into Polish. Scroll down for the full transcript of Claire Edward’s presentation

Full transcript 

[0.12 – 5G in Space: Pros and Cons]

Good morning, everybody. I would like to talk about 5G in space today and I want to address the pros and cons.

[0.30 – 5G space pros]

So first let’s look at the pros – or the supposed advantages of 5G in space.

First we are told that 5G in space will help mitigate global warming – climate change. And we are told that it will help with health issues. We’re told that 5G in space will provide services to aircraft, both military and commercial.

But above all, it seems to me, on looking at the documents, that actually this is all about control.

It’s about controlling what people do in “smart” cities.

It’s about monitoring and controlling agriculture.

It’s about controlling what people do at sea – for example, overfishing.

So it’s a control agenda.

[2.25 – Main players]

Which companies are the main players in this? Here you have a list of the five main companies.

And the plan is to put over 20,000 satellites in space to beam 5G over the entire planet. The Iridium company – they already have their 66 satellites. They went up last year. But my understanding is that first they need to establish the ground stations so these are not operating yet.

And yesterday you may have heard that the OneWeb company launched six satellites last night [27 February 2019]. And these are only part oftheir proposed constellations so these will also not be operating yet. And I see that – for OneWeb – one rocket will launch 35 satellites at a time. So I imagine that it will take several months – even 16 months before they have enough satellites for them to start operating with 5G. At least I hope so.

[4.58 – 5G Space cons]

What are the cons? What are the disadvantages of beaming 5G from space?

The major one is: There has never been any health or safety testing of 5G! The second one is that the word that the proponents use is to “blanket” the Earth. To blanket the Earth means to cover every square centimetre of this planet. There would be no escape – even in the desert, in the rainforest, on the ocean. This has very serious implications for children, who have the smallest bodies and they are the most vulnerable. Also for people who already suffer from microwave sickness. And we calculate there are at least 20 million people worldwide already who suffer from microwave sickness. When 5G starts, there are likely to be many, many more.

Also we know that there are very, very serious implications for nature.

And for insects because insects have the tiniest bodies and they resonate with millimetre waves, which are very short. We’ve already lost 80% of our insects in the last 20 years so with 5G we’re likely to lose 100% of our insects.

[7.50 – Children]

You can see here that, when an adult uses a mobile phone, the penetration of the brain is 25%, but when a five-year-old child uses a mobile phone, the penetration is 75%. And that’s only oneof the implications for children.

[8.55 – 5G space cons]

Here you can see examples of the consequences for trees. These pictures were taken by a scientist in Germany. Here you see an antenna and the side of the tree facing the antenna has died. You can see this for yourself if you see any [apartment] house with Wi-Fi and you look at the tree [immediately] outside the house, you’re likely to see the same phenomenon. And here is traffic radar, which is hidden in a bush and that side of the bush has died.

[10.03 – 5G space cons]

So how do we know what is likely to happen with these 5G satellites? Well, we don’t, but we have some knowledge of what has happened in the past.

Twenty years ago, the company Iridium launched 66 satellites for the first

satellite telephones. And a scientist in the United States called Arthur Firstenberg recorded what happened in the following two weeks. The US national death rate rose 4 to 5%. Thousands of US homing pigeons lost their way and never came back. Electrically sensitive people worldwide reported terrible symptoms.

[11.55 – 5G space cons]

OK, more disadvantages or more cons: effects on global warming. Just one aspect. There will be thousands of rocket launches and these rockets will use kerosene fuel. And when it burns, this kerosene fuel will produce black soot, causing massive pollution worldwide.

And just to give you an idea, currently officially we have 1,700 satellites. So putting up 20,000 satellites multiplies the number by at least 12 times. We simply don’t know the consequences.

I think my colleague earlier talked about power line harmonic radiation. We have electricity power lines right across the world. And these signals go up into the ionosphere and the magnetosphere where they are multiplied hundreds of thousands of times.

I think probably also it was explained about the Schumann resonance. I’m sure everybody is familiar [with that].

The Schumann resonance used to be 7.83 Hertz and our brains operate at 7.83 Hertz so we function in resonance with the Earth. So if we start interfering with the global electric circuit, this has very serious consequences or implications for our brains and the functioning of our entire bodies.

[14.40 – 5G space cons]

So just as our bodies consist of – our bodies operate electrically and we have our own electrical system. So the Earth also has its own electrical system and it’s called the “global electric circuit”.

[15.31 – Global electric circuit]

Here you see an image of the global electric circuit and you can see the ionosphere and the magnetosphere. Now, to understand the global electric circuit, you need scientists in many, many different fields. So right now we do NOT understand the working of the global electric circuit. But nevertheless, we plan to put at least 20,000 5G satellites up there!

[16.25 –5G space cons]

And they will be emitting digitally pulsed millimetre wave radiation of up to 5 million watts into the Earth’s magnetosphere. And satellite signals pulsed at extremely low frequencies and very low frequencies are demodulated (or extracted) by the ionosphere, and – as we saw – amplified hundreds of thousands of times by the magnetosphere.

[17.28 –Global electric circuit – human body]

This is an image of the electrical circuit of the human body.

[17.39 –International Appeal to Stop 5G on Earth and in Space]

I’m here representing the International Appeal to Stop 5G on Earth and in Space because we think this is all extremely dangerous! This is an international Appeal and we have a website with – I’ve lost count of how many languages – I think it’s 23 currently, and that includes Polish. The Appeal explains very clearly this problem.

And so we would ask you to read it, sign it – it’s open for everybody to sign.

We currently have over 50,000 signatures [as at February 2019].

Thousands of doctors and scientists have signed and 750 organizations, all of them from 168 countries. So please read it, understand it and please tell everybody else. We can use this Appeal as an educational tool. You can also use it as a campaigning tool so you can send it to anybody you think who could change this situation – school teachers, head teachers, doctors, politicians …

People say to me, “But what can I do? I’m just one person.”

And somebody said to me a few months ago, “Oh, no. I don’t want to be involved in this.” She said, “It’s a David and Goliath situation.”

I’d just like to remind you who won. It was David!

We are two people: myself and Arthur Firstenberg, who administer this Appeal and we have reached millionsof people.

I believe that everybodycan participate in this and every individual can make a difference. It doesn’t matter who you are or what your skills are. You can contribute.

We are many and they are few! So welcome to the campaign!

22:08 – END

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This presentation was first published on Clarity.

Claire Edwards, BA Hons, MA, worked for the United Nations as Editor and Trainer in Intercultural Writing from 1999 to 2017. Claire warned the Secretary-General about the dangers of 5G during a meeting with UN staff in May 2018, calling for a halt to its rollout at UN duty stations.  She part-authored, designed, administered the 30 language versions, and edited the entirety of the International Appeal to Stop 5G on Earth and in Space (www.5gspaceappeal.org) and vigorously campaigned to promote it throughout 2019. In January 2020, she severed connection with the Appeal when its administrator, Arthur Firstenberg, joined forces with a third-party group, stop5ginternational, which brought itself into disrepute at its foundation by associating with the Club of Rome/Club of Budapest eugenicist movement. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

“You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”—George Orwell, 1984

Tread cautiously: the fiction of George Orwell has become an operation manual for the omnipresent, modern-day surveillance state.

It’s been 70 years since Orwell—dying, beset by fever and bloody coughing fits, and driven to warn against the rise of a society in which rampant abuse of power and mass manipulation are the norm—depicted the ominous rise of ubiquitous technology, fascism and totalitarianism in 1984.

Who could have predicted that 70 years after Orwell typed the final words to his dystopian novel, “He loved Big Brother,” we would fail to heed his warning and come to love Big Brother.

“To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone— to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink — greetings!”—George Orwell

1984 portrays a global society of total control in which people are not allowed to have thoughts that in any way disagree with the corporate state. There is no personal freedom, and advanced technology has become the driving force behind a surveillance-driven society. Snitches and cameras are everywhere. People are subject to the Thought Police, who deal with anyone guilty of thought crimes. The government, or “Party,” is headed by Big Brother who appears on posters everywhere with the words: “Big Brother is watching you.”

We have arrived, way ahead of schedule, into the dystopian future dreamed up by not only Orwell but also such fiction writers as Aldous Huxley, Margaret Atwood and Philip K. Dick.

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”―George Orwell

Much like Orwell’s Big Brother in 1984, the government and its corporate spies now watch our every move. Much like Huxley’s A Brave New World, we are churning out a society of watchers who “have their liberties taken away from them, but … rather enjoy it, because they [are] distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing.” Much like Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the populace is now taught to “know their place and their duties, to understand that they have no real rights but will be protected up to a point if they conform, and to think so poorly of themselves that they will accept their assigned fate and not rebel or run away.”

Image on the right: Still from Minority Report

And in keeping with Philip K. Dick’s darkly prophetic vision of a dystopian police state—which became the basis for Steven Spielberg’s futuristic thriller Minority Report—we are now trapped in a world in which the government is all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful, and if you dare to step out of line, dark-clad police SWAT teams and pre-crime units will crack a few skulls to bring the populace under control.

What once seemed futuristic no longer occupies the realm of science fiction.

Incredibly, as the various nascent technologies employed and shared by the government and corporations alike—facial recognition, iris scanners, massive databases, behavior prediction software, and so on—are incorporated into a complex, interwoven cyber network aimed at tracking our movements, predicting our thoughts and controlling our behavior, the dystopian visions of past writers is fast becoming our reality.

Our world is characterized by widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining, fusion centers, driverless cars, voice-controlled homes, facial recognition systems, cybugs and drones, and predictive policing (pre-crime) aimed at capturing would-be criminals before they can do any damage.

Surveillance cameras are everywhere. Government agents listen in on our telephone calls and read our emails. Political correctness—a philosophy that discourages diversity—has become a guiding principle of modern society.

“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”―George Orwell

The courts have shredded the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. In fact, SWAT teams battering down doors without search warrants and FBI agents acting as a secret police that investigate dissenting citizens are common occurrences in contemporary America. And bodily privacy and integrity have been utterly eviscerated by a prevailing view that Americans have no rights over what happens to their bodies during an encounter with government officials, who are allowed to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe, pat down, taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation.

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”―George Orwell, Animal Farm

We are increasingly ruled by multi-corporations wedded to the police state.

What many fail to realize is that the government is not operating alone. It cannot. The government requires an accomplice. Thus, the increasingly complex security needs of the massive federal government, especially in the areas of defense, surveillance and data management, have been met within the corporate sector, which has shown itself to be a powerful ally that both depends on and feeds the growth of governmental overreach.

In fact, Big Tech wedded to Big Government has become Big Brother, and we are now ruled by the Corporate Elite whose tentacles have spread worldwide. For example, USA Today reports that five years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the homeland security business was booming to such an extent that it eclipsed mature enterprises like movie-making and the music industry in annual revenue. This security spending to private corporations such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft and others is forecast to exceed $1 trillion in the near future.

The government now has at its disposal technological arsenals so sophisticated and invasive as to render any constitutional protections null and void. Spearheaded by the NSA, which has shown itself to care little to nothing for constitutional limits or privacy, the “security/industrial complex”—a marriage of government, military and corporate interests aimed at keeping Americans under constant surveillance—has come to dominate the government and our lives. At three times the size of the CIA, constituting one third of the intelligence budget and with its own global spy network to boot, the NSA has a long history of spying on Americans, whether or not it has always had the authorization to do so.

Money, power, control. There is no shortage of motives fueling the convergence of mega-corporations and government. But who is paying the price? The American people, of course.

Orwell understood what many Americans, caught up in their partisan flag-waving, are still struggling to come to terms with: that there is no such thing as a government organized for the good of the people. Even the best intentions among those in government inevitably give way to the desire to maintain power and control over the citizenry at all costs. As Orwell explains:

The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know what no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.

“The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.” ― George Orwell

How do you change the way people think? You start by changing the words they use.

In totalitarian regimes—a.k.a. police states—where conformity and compliance are enforced at the end of a loaded gun, the government dictates what words can and cannot be used. In countries where the police state hides behind a benevolent mask and disguises itself as tolerance, the citizens censor themselves, policing their words and thoughts to conform to the dictates of the mass mind.

Dystopian literature shows what happens when the populace is transformed into mindless automatons. In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, reading is banned and books are burned in order to suppress dissenting ideas, while televised entertainment is used to anesthetize the populace and render them easily pacified, distracted and controlled.

In Huxley’s Brave New World, serious literature, scientific thinking and experimentation are banned as subversive, while critical thinking is discouraged through the use of conditioning, social taboos and inferior education. Likewise, expressions of individuality, independence and morality are viewed as vulgar and abnormal.

And in Orwell’s 1984, Big Brother does away with all undesirable and unnecessary words and meanings, even going so far as to routinely rewrite history and punish “thoughtcrimes.” In this dystopian vision of the future, the Thought Police serve as the eyes and ears of Big Brother, while the Ministry of Peace deals with war and defense, the Ministry of Plenty deals with economic affairs (rationing and starvation), the Ministry of Love deals with law and order (torture and brainwashing), and the Ministry of Truth deals with news, entertainment, education and art (propaganda). The mottos of Oceania: WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

All three—Bradbury, Huxley and Orwell—had an uncanny knack for realizing the future, yet it is Orwell who best understood the power of language to manipulate the masses. Orwell’s Big Brother relied on Newspeak to eliminate undesirable words, strip such words as remained of unorthodox meanings and make independent, non-government-approved thought altogether unnecessary. To give a single example, as psychologist Erich Fromm illustrates in his afterword to 1984:

The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as “This dog is free from lice” or “This field is free from weeds.” It could not be used in its old sense of “politically free” or “intellectually free,” since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed as concepts….

Where we stand now is at the juncture of OldSpeak (where words have meanings, and ideas can be dangerous) and Newspeak (where only that which is “safe” and “accepted” by the majority is permitted). The power elite has made their intentions clear: they will pursue and prosecute any and all words, thoughts and expressions that challenge their authority.

This is the final link in the police state chain.

“Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”—George Orwell

Americans have been conditioned to accept routine incursions on their privacy rights. In fact, the addiction to screen devices—especially cell phones—has created a hive effect where the populace not only watched but is controlled by AI bots. However, at one time, the idea of a total surveillance state tracking one’s every move would have been abhorrent to most Americans. That all changed with the 9/11 attacks. As professor Jeffrey Rosen observes, “Before Sept. 11, the idea that Americans would voluntarily agree to live their lives under the gaze of a network of biometric surveillance cameras, peering at them in government buildings, shopping malls, subways and stadiums, would have seemed unthinkable, a dystopian fantasy of a society that had surrendered privacy and anonymity.”

Having been reduced to a cowering citizenry—mute in the face of elected officials who refuse to represent us, helpless in the face of police brutality, powerless in the face of militarized tactics and technology that treat us like enemy combatants on a battlefield, and naked in the face of government surveillance that sees and hears all—we have nowhere left to go.

We have, so to speak, gone from being a nation where privacy is king to one where nothing is safe from the prying eyes of government. In search of so-called terrorists and extremists hiding amongst us—the proverbial “needle in a haystack,” as one official termed it—the Corporate State has taken to monitoring all aspects of our lives, from cell phone calls and emails to Internet activity and credit card transactions. Much of this data is being fed through fusion centers across the country, which work with the Department of Homeland Security to make threat assessments on every citizen, including school children. These are state and regional intelligence centers that collect data on you.

“Big Brother is Watching You.”―George Orwell

Wherever you go and whatever you do, you are now being watched, especially if you leave behind an electronic footprint. When you use your cell phone, you leave a record of when the call was placed, who you called, how long it lasted and even where you were at the time. When you use your ATM card, you leave a record of where and when you used the card. There is even a video camera at most locations equipped with facial recognition software. When you use a cell phone or drive a car enabled with GPS, you can be tracked by satellite. Such information is shared with government agents, including local police. And all of this once-private information about your consumer habits, your whereabouts and your activities is now being fed to the U.S. government.

The government has nearly inexhaustible resources when it comes to tracking our movements, from electronic wiretapping devices, traffic cameras and biometrics to radio-frequency identification cards, satellites and Internet surveillance.

Speech recognition technology now makes it possible for the government to carry out massive eavesdropping by way of sophisticated computer systems. Phone calls can be monitored, the audio converted to text files and stored in computer databases indefinitely. And if any “threatening” words are detected—no matter how inane or silly—the record can be flagged and assigned to a government agent for further investigation. Federal and state governments, again working with private corporations, monitor your Internet content. Users are profiled and tracked in order to identify, target and even prosecute them.

In such a climate, everyone is a suspect. And you’re guilty until you can prove yourself innocent. To underscore this shift in how the government now views its citizens, the FBI uses its wide-ranging authority to investigate individuals or groups, regardless of whether they are suspected of criminal activity.

“Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.” ― George Orwell

Here’s what a lot of people fail to understand, however: it’s not just what you say or do that is being monitored, but how you think that is being tracked and targeted. We’ve already seen this play out on the state and federal level with hate crime legislation that cracks down on so-called “hateful” thoughts and expression, encourages self-censoring and reduces free debate on various subject matter.

Say hello to the new Thought Police.

Total Internet surveillance by the Corporate State, as omnipresent as God, is used by the government to predict and, more importantly, control the populace, and it’s not as far-fetched as you might think. For example, the NSA is now designing an artificial intelligence system that is designed to anticipate your every move. In a nutshell, the NSA will feed vast amounts of the information it collects to a computer system known as Aquaint (the acronym stands for Advanced QUestion Answering for INTelligence), which the computer can then use to detect patterns and predict behavior.

No information is sacred or spared.

Everything from cell phone recordings and logs, to emails, to text messages, to personal information posted on social networking sites, to credit card statements, to library circulation records, to credit card histories, etc., is collected by the NSA and shared freely with its agents in crime: the CIA, FBI and DHS. One NSA researcher actually quit the Aquaint program, “citing concerns over the dangers in placing such a powerful weapon in the hands of a top-secret agency with little accountability.”

Thus, what we are witnessing, in the so-called name of security and efficiency, is the creation of a new class system comprised of the watched (average Americans such as you and me) and the watchers (government bureaucrats, technicians and private corporations).

Clearly, the age of privacy in America is at an end.

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”—Orwell

So where does that leave us?

We now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored, managed and controlled by our technology, which answers not to us but to our government and corporate rulers. This is the fact-is-stranger-than-fiction lesson that is being pounded into us on a daily basis.

It won’t be long before we find ourselves looking back on the past with longing, back to an age where we could speak to whom we wanted, buy what we wanted, think what we wanted without those thoughts, words and activities being tracked, processed and stored by corporate giants such as Google, sold to government agencies such as the NSA and CIA, and used against us by militarized police with their army of futuristic technologies.

To be an individual today, to not conform, to have even a shred of privacy, and to live beyond the reach of the government’s roaming eyes and technological spies, one must not only be a rebel but rebel.

Even when you rebel and take your stand, there is rarely a happy ending awaiting you. You are rendered an outlaw.

So how do you survive in the American surveillance state?

We’re running out of options.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we’ll soon have to choose between self-indulgence (the bread-and-circus distractions offered up by the news media, politicians, sports conglomerates, entertainment industry, etc.) and self-preservation in the form of renewed vigilance about threats to our freedoms and active engagement in self-governance.

Yet as Aldous Huxley acknowledged in Brave New World Revisited: “Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern themselves effectively by democratic procedures. A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time, not on the spot, not here and now and in their calculable future, but somewhere else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera, of mythology and metaphysical fantasy, will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those would manipulate and control it.”

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This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People  is available at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at [email protected]. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research. 

Trump just dramatically increased trade tensions between the US and China after publicly demanding that President Xi hold talks with him at the G20 otherwise he’ll immediately impose tariffs on $300 billion worth of imports, which is nothing less than economic blackmail and a serious form of psychological warfare on his counterpart. The concept of “face” is one of the most important characteristics of Chinese culture and under no circumstances should a person ever be seen as “losing” it, though Trump just put Xi in a dilemma whereby he’s bound to “lose face” regardless of whatever he does. It’ll be seen as capitulating to Trump’s blackmail if he holds talks with him at the G20, whereas declining to do so will carry with it an unprecedented economic punishment. Either way, Xi “loses face”, and the lose-lose position that he’s in is bound to exacerbate factional divisions within the Communist Party over the country’s approach to the “trade war“.

On one hand, there are those who think that China should cut a deal with the US before the tariffs become so severe that they trigger a large-scale supply chain rerouting that leads to long-term economic problems, though the paradox is that agreeing to Trump’s “Open Door” policy would shock the country’s economic system either way. On the other hand, some voices think that China should dig in its heels for a prolonged “trade war” and proactively take all necessary measures to soften the blow of the US’ de-facto sanctions and secure the many links of the global supply chain within their country. These so-called “hardliners” (from the American perspective) will probably gain more influence over Xi as a result of Trump’s economic blackmail against him and his impending “loss of face”, though somewhat counterintuitively, that might be exactly what the US hopes will happen if one accepts the theory that Trump never wanted to reach a deal with China to begin with but was instead looking for a pretext to implement his promised policy of “economic nationalism”.

Either way, the Chinese are now on the strategic defensive in more ways than one since Trump’s psychological warfare on Xi is a global humiliation for such a proud Great Power. The American leader was thought to have crossed the Rubicon last month when he insulted the country’s negotiating team by accusing them of double-dealing after they supposedly changed their mind at the very last minute right when they were supposed to have formalized the trade agreement that they were trying to clinch for months already, one which would have probably been lopsided in America’s favor. In hindsight, it might have been a ploy by the Chinese to go along with these talks for so long before suddenly reconsidering their position in a bid to get the US to balance out the terms in its desperation to seal the deal ahead of the 2020 elections, but that would have been a fundamental misreading of Trump’s intent should it have been the case. As it stands, whatever the Chinese do will play into Trump’s hands, unless of course they have a ace up their sleeves that they’ve yet to play.

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This article was originally published on Eurasia Future.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) 19th summit is scheduled to be held in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, on 13-14 June 2019. It is a Eurasian political, economic, and security alliance, the creation of which was announced on 15 June 2001 in Shanghai, China by the leaders of China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan; but its Charter, formally establishing the organization, was signed in June 2002 and entered into force on 19 September 2003. The original five nations, with the exclusion of Uzbekistan, were previously members of the Shanghai Five group, founded on 26 April 1996. Since then, the organization has expanded its membership to eight countries when India and Pakistan joined SCO as full members on 9 June 2017 at a summit in Astana, Kazakhstan.  There are 4 observer states Afghanistan, Belarus, Iran, and Mongolia. While 6 countries are dialogue partners: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Cambodia, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Turkey. It is well understood that the organization may expand in the future extending full membership to other countries too.

The Heads of State Council (HSC) is the supreme decision-making body in the SCO, it meets once a year and adopts decisions and guidelines on all important matters of the organization. This summit will be 19th in its series and will be held in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan on 13-14 June 2019.

All heads of states (Presidents/ Prime ministers) are expected to attend the subject summit. Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan will be attending this year’s summit. All preparations are in place for his trip. He is also scheduled to meet President Putin and President Xi on sideline meetings and expected to discuss broad spectrum on all issues by lateral basis especially the dynamic geopolitics of the region and mutual cooperation in all dimensions. He might grab the chance to meet Prime Minister Modi too.

In fact, Pakistan plays a pivotal role in Eurasia and serves as gateway to the Arabian Ocean – Hot Waters. It is an all-weather, shortest, and most economical trade route. It might change the trade pattern for the whole world. Pakistan’s deep-sea Gwadar seaport will be the hub of all future commercial activities.

Pakistan enjoys historical, cultural and religious links with most of the central Asian states. China is time tested reliable friend, Russia is also a country of shared destiny. Russia and Pakistan are suffering western coercion and sanctions.

SCO is a platform to discuss all relevant issues and promote cooperation and harmony. With the emerging geopolitics of the region, SCO compels all of the member states to formulate a joint strategy to counter the growing trend of coercion, threats, use of force and military build-ups. US-Iran Tension, Sino-US tension, Afghan Issues, Indo-Pacific Alliance and anti-BRI sentiments, all will be top of agenda and may be discussed in depth.

While all heads of states meet, it is expected to come up with the solutions to maintain the stability of the region, peace, and development. This region inhabits almost half of the world’s population. Stability of this region means the stability of the whole world.

This region is rich in natural and human resources. There exists a huge potential for this region to overcome poverty and gain prosperity. There is a dire need to promote cooperation, mutual understanding, harmony, and stability.

The expectations are high and it is time to take extraordinary measures to overcome the existential challenges in this region. Trust, “if there is a will, there is a way”.

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Prof. Engr. Zamir Ahmed Awan, Sinologist (ex-Diplomate), Non-Resident Fellow of CCG (Center for China and Globalization), National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), Islamabad, Pakistan.

There has been an on-going tectonic shift in the West since the abandonment of the Bretton Woods agreement in 1971. This accelerated when the USSR ended and has resulted in the ‘neoliberal globalization’ we see today. 

At the same time, there has been an unprecedented campaign to re-engineer social consensus in the West. Part of this strategy, involves getting populations in Western countries to fixate on ‘global warming’, ‘gender equity’ and ‘anti-racism’: by focusing on identity politics and climate change, the devastating effects and injustices brought about by globalized capitalism and associated militarism largely remain unchallenged by the masses and stay firmly in the background.

This is the argument presented by Denis Rancourt, researcher at Ontario Civil Liberties Association, in a new report. Rancourt is a former full professor of physics at the University of Ottawa in Canada and author of ‘Geo-economics and geo-politics drive successive eras of predatory globalization and social engineering: Historical emergence of climate change, gender equity, and anti-racism as state doctrines’ (April 2019).

In the report, Rancourt references Michael Hudson’s 1972 book ‘Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire’ to help explain the key role of maintaining dollar hegemony and the importance of the petrodollar to US global dominance. Aside from the significance of oil, Rancourt argues that the US has an existential interest to ensure that opioid drugs are traded in US dollars, another major global commodity. This explains the US occupation of Afghanistan. He also pinpoints the importance of US agribusiness and the arms industry in helping to secure US geostrategic goals.  

Since the fall of the USSR in 1991, Rancourt says that US war campaigns have, among other things, protected the US dollar from abandonment, destroyed nations seeking sovereignty from US dominance, secured the opium trade, increased control over oil and have frustrated Eurasian integration. In addition, we have seen certain countries face a bombardment of sanctions and hostility in an attempt to destroy energy-producing centres that the US does not control, not least Russia.

He also outlines the impacts within Western countries too, including: the systematic relative loss of middle-class economic status, the rise of urban homelessness, the decimation of the industrial working class, corporate megamergers, rising inequality, the dismantling of welfare, financial speculation, stagnant wages, debt, deregulation and privatisation. In addition, the increased leniency in food and drug regulation has led to the dramatic increase in the use of the herbicide glyphosate, which has been concurrent with upsurges of many diseases and chronic ailments. 

In the face of this devastation, Western nations have had to secure ongoing consent among their own populations. To help explain how this has been achieved, Rancourt focuses on gender equity, anti-racism and global warming as state doctrines that have been used to divert attention from the machinations of US empire (and also to prevent class consciousness taking hold). I recently asked Denis Rancourt about this aspect of his report.   

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Colin Todhunter: Can you say a bit about yourself and how you came to produce this report? What is it meant to achieve? 

Denis Rancourt:  I’m a former physics professor, environmental scientist and a civil rights advocate. I currently work as a researcher for the Ontario Civil Liberties Association (ocla.ca). During a conversation about civil rights issues I had with the executive director of OCLA, we identified several important societal and economic phenomena that seemed to be related to the early 1990s. So, I eventually settled in to do some ‘heavy lifting’, research wise.

While there is no lack of hired intellectuals and experts to wrongly guide our perception, my research demonstrates a link between surges in large-scale suppression and exploitation of national populations with the acceleration of an aggressive, exploitative globalization.

CT: In your report, you’ve described the consequences of the abandonment of Bretton Woods and the dissolution of the USSR in terms of dollar hegemony, US militarism and the devastating impacts of ‘neoliberal globalisation’ both for nation states and for ordinary people.

DR: There is little doubt that Russian and Chinese analysts have a solid understanding of what I have outlined in my report. For instance, foreshadowing Trump’s trade war, the People’s Liberation Army Major-General Qiao Liang’s April 2015 speech to the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee and government office, included the following:

“Since that day [dissolution of Bretton Woods], a true financial empire has emerged, the US dollar’s hegemony has been established, and we have entered a true paper currency era. There is no precious metal behind the US dollar. The government’s credit is the sole support for the US dollar. The US makes a profit from the whole world. This means that the Americans can obtain material wealth from the world by printing a piece of green paper. […] If we [now] acknowledge that there is a US dollar index cycle [punctuated by engineered crises, including war] and the Americans use this cycle to harvest from other countries, then we can conclude that it was time for the Americans to harvest China…” 

CT: You discuss the need for states to ensure consent: the need to pacify, hypnotize and align populations for continued globalization; more precisely, the need to divert attention from the structural violence of economic policies and the actual violence of militarism. Can you say something about how the issue of global warming relates to this?

DR:  Irrespective of whether the so-called ‘climate crisis’ is real, exaggerated or fabricated, it is clear, from the data in my report, that the ethos of global warming was engineered on a global scale and benefits the exploiters of the carbon-economy and, more indirectly, the state.

For example, one of the studies that I review shows that a many-fold increase in mainstream media reporting about global warming suddenly occurred in the mid-2000s, in all the leading news media, at the same time that the financiers and their acolytes such as Al Gore decided to make and manage a global carbon economy. This media campaign has been sustained ever since and the global warming ethos has been institutionalized.

Carbon sequestration schemes have devastated local communities on every occupied continent. If anything, carbon schemes − from wind farms to biofuel harvesting to industrial battery production to solar-cell array installations to mining uranium to mega hydro-dam construction and so on – have accelerated habitat destruction. 

Meanwhile, economic and military warfare rages, glyphosate is dumped into the ecosphere at unprecedented rates (poured on GM herbicide-resistant cash crops), active genocides are in progress (Yemen), the US is unilaterally withdrawing from nuclear treaties and forcing an arms race with next generation death machines and US-held extortionary loans are serviced by land-use transformation on the scale of nations; while our educated children have nervous breakdowns trying to get governments to “act” on “climate”. 

In the early-1990s, a world conference on climate environmentalism was an express response to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. This was part of a global propaganda project intended to mask the new wave of accelerated predatory globalism that was unleashed now that the USSR was definitively out of the way. 

CT: What are your thoughts on Greta Thunberg and the movement surrounding her? 

DR:  It is sad and pathetic. The movement is a testament to the success of the global propaganda project that I describe in my report. The movement is also an indicator of the degree to which totalitarianism has taken hold in Western societies; wherein individuals, associations and institutions lose their ability for independent thought to steer society away from the designs of an occupying elite. Individuals (and their parents) become morality police in the service of this ‘environmentalism’.

CT: You also talk about the emergence of gender-equity (third wave feminism) and anti-racism as state doctrines. Can you say something about this? 

DR: In my report, I use historical institutional records and societal data to demonstrate that a triad of ‘state religions’ was globally engendered and emerged on cue following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. This triad consists of climate alarmism, exaggerated tunnel-vision focus on gender equity and a campaign of anti-racism focussed on engineering thoughts, language and attitudes.

These state ideologies were conceived and propelled by UN efforts and the resulting signed protocols. Western academia enthusiastically took up and institutionalized the program. Mainstream media religiously promoted the newly minted ethos. Political parties largely applied increased quotas of gender and race elected representatives. 

These processes and ideas served to sooth, massage and occupy the Western mind, especially among the upper-middle, professional and managerial classes and the elite classes of economically occupied territories but did nothing to alleviate the most violent and globally widespread forms of actual racism and misogyny as a result of predatory globalization and militarism. 

Ironically, the global attacks on human dignity, human health and the environment were in proportion to the systematic and sometimes shrill calls for gender equity, anti-racism and climate ‘action’. The entire edifice of these ‘state religions’ leaves no room for required conflicts of class and expressly undermines any questioning of the mechanisms and consequences of globalization. 

CT: Can you say something about the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests), Brexit and the Trump electoral phenomenon. 

DR: Combine aggressive globalization, constant financial predation, gutting of the Western working and middle classes and a glib discourse of climate change, anti-racism and gender equity and something has to give. French geographer Christophe Guilluy predicted the reactions in some detail, and it is not difficult to understand. It is no accident that the revolting working- and middle-classes are critical of the narratives of climate crisis, anti-racism and gender equity; and that their voices are cast by the mainstream media as racist, misogynist and ignorant of science.

It seems that any class which opposes its own destruction is accused of being populated by racist and ignorant folks that can’t see that salvation lies in a carbon-managed and globalized world. It becomes imperative, therefore, to shut down all the venues where such an ‘ignorant lot’ could communicate their views, attempt to organize and thereby threaten the prevailing social order. 

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Colin Todhunter is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research.

“Just as surely history is the product of those forces which seek to dominate in the name of glory or profit, equally is history the product of the forces of those who rebel” – Michael Manley, 1978

As a critical social science scholar, I reject the positivist view that reality is objective and in order for knowledge to be considered legitimate, it must be substantiated only through statistical data and citing “authorities”. I acknowledge that I have biases. My ontological and epistemological standpoint is primarily shaped by my personal experiences – whether through interactions with others, observations, listening for diverse views, reading extensively and being in a position of vulnerability.

I grew up in rural Jamaica and was raised by my grandparents. My mother was a college drop out and I have never met my father. In the small community of Barbary Hill, I witnessed and experienced abject poverty, deplorable roads, limited access to water, no scope for stable and quality forms of employment, teenage pregnancy, gang violence and hovering above all of these deficiencies is people’s quest to survive in a socially and economically depressed environment.

Majority of the household heads including mine are women. Their faces are punctuated by severe hardships but they never expressed complaint as they found various means to make a living and to take care of their families. Even when the bodies of the women were tired, they were forced to carry the burden of their cross and the cross of others because this is a “natural” expectation of them. The ability to balance multiple roles up to the point of extreme exhaustion.

As a young woman and a researcher, my life is punctuated by navigating multiple sources of exploitation through resistance in what I call a “Babylon” (capitalist) system. I was told that no one in Jamaica from my community would ever be selected for any grand opportunity because Jamaica is Kingston, the capital. I resisted. I went ahead at the age of ten and I won my first public speaking competition. I remember when a teacher told a group of students in my grade nine class in high school that no matter what authority does, authority will always be right and will never stand punishment. I resisted.

I ran for the Student’s Council and I helped to make students more aware of their rights and I fought to end the grade streaming system. I remember when I had almost quarter million in debts to pay for both tuition and rent in my undergraduate years in Jamaica and I was working in a low paying job. I resisted. I left the job. I was punished by not receiving my outstanding compensation but I left with dignity because I realize the true value of my labour. I will never be compensated by a group of people who are only interested in profit making. Recently, I have decided to re-define feminine beauty on my own terms in which I decided to cut my hair extremely low. My hair sends a political message that I am in the process unlearning to learn another side of a story that I am willing to discover. It also suggests that I am a rebel that is re-born –  radical and strategic in my challenge to the status quo.

Thus, before education can be used as tool for social transformation and before a researcher can create an alternative discourse and representations of people on the margins, the researcher must first establish her personal philosophy. When I say that my personal is always political, I mean that it is a political choice to use my personal experiences as a set of philosophies to guide the way in which I speak, write, engage and my deliberate use of data collection methods that are not imposed from the top-down. When I say that my personal is always political, I mean that I am able to acknowledge situations in which I possess power and privilege but I am also cognizant of the fact that I become one with the subjects (women workers) who I wish to study because of a common nationality, gender, race and social class.

It is no longer ‘I’ but ‘we’. When I say that my personal is always political, I mean that I have become more aware that it is not necessarily my boss that is my enemy but a rather a broader system that thrives on extraction of ideas and labour. When I say that my personal is always political, I mean that I have become more aware that while I am situated in a country that has a long contentious history of violent encounters and subjugation of marginalized peoples, my decision and the decision of women to resist is also a part of that history that is usually omitted. This is because the political agenda is one that is white, hegemonic and patriarchal.

My first experience with workers was when I had worked as a research assistant in Jamaica.  Island wide focus group discussions according to clusters and electronic questionnaires were conducted in order to investigate perceptions and attitudes towards work and management in Jamaica’s public and private sectors. To organize the focus group discussions according to clusters was an extremely challenging task because many names on the list were no longer working in a specific department, they have transferred to another cluster, have retired or have died. When I did daily calls, many workers expressed skepticism in their tone because they thought that if they shared information about their feelings towards management, they would risk losing their jobs. Others were excited to be selected for participation and they are others who flatly rejected the idea even though there is a confidentiality and informed consent paper to be signed prior to the focus group discussion.

My most memorable experience was the first focus group discussion among workers in a well renowned public sector company in Jamaica. As the note taker, I observed the way in which the workers had entered the hotel room. The pace of their walk was extremely slow almost as if they were walking on hot bricks. This suggests anxiety and distrust towards the new environment. While they expressed warm greetings, they never displayed sharp eye contact with the facilitator or me in the beginning. I realized that they were taking time to be settled mentally and to decipher who we are and if we could be trusted before they demonstrated a full sense of comfort, support and trust. Within the introductory remarks, the participants were reminded about the confidentiality protocol and that us, as researcher will protect their identity and that this is a safe space for sharing their thoughts and feelings about work and management. The faces of the workers immediately became more radiant with smiles and deep gasps of relief. One lady in particular, began to clap her hand in approval by responding, “Well, I am ready and I can’t wait to share!”. The focus group discussions were guided by a semi-structured interview style of questions.

The first question, in my opinion, was the most potent of all questions. This is not only because it sets the context for the meta-perspective on the attitudes and perceptions of workers towards work and management but because the responses helped me to connect more with the experiences of the worker. Each participant was assigned the name of a fruit for confidentiality purposes and they were asked, “what images come to your mind when you think of your workplace?”

An outspoken participant whose fruit name was Star Apple said:

“The image that comes to my mind when I think about my work place is a burial ground because as a young person, you come in with so many high aspirations, bright ideas and good potential but management buries that. Management is concerned about how well you can follow what they want you do and not what you can add”.

Another worker whose fruit name is Pineapple added,

“Yes, that is so true. I see the work place as a plantation. You work extremely hard with little or no compensation. You will go above and beyond to do what you need to and management treats you like shit. I remember when we were short of staff one week and we had to adjust by taking on extra duties. I lift heavy weight materials and worked over time. I did not receive additional compensation. One day, it was raining and I called the office for an umbrella and no one answered the phone. No umbrella. No lunch and no extra compensation and when I fell ill, all my supervisor did was shout loudly at me to work harder”.

The first two responses left an indelible mark in my mind and in fact, I was able to connect these practical issues to conceptual issues because at the time, I was doing a free elective course in Management Studies called Organizational Behaviour at the University of the West Indies, Mona. I was introduced to the first and only case study on Jamaican workers’ attitudes of de-motivation in the labour force. It is called ‘Why Workers Wont Work’ by Kenneth Carter. Carter (1997) debated that the Jamaican workplace is similar to the plantation model in which there was a rigid three tiered bureaucratic structure. Workers are de-motivated and dissatisfied because management are like slave drivers.

They always expect more productivity and profit without any serious interest in motivating, coaching and helping to upgrade the skills, talents and knowledge of workers. Workers express their dissatisfaction by regular absenteeism to slow down productivity or they express these feelings in other covert ways.  Hence, it is no surprise that the images that came to the mind of the participants in this research were the “burial ground and the plantation”. This knowledge was not used in the particular research project for the company. However, for current purposes, I have decided to incorporate historical knowledge on workers in order to connect the consistent patterns of the past to issues in contemporary development such as export processing zones in Jamaica. The bodies of women were sites of violence, subjugation, exploitation and colonial oppression and today they are sites of new forms of imperial encounters but also resistance (Belen and Bose, 1990). This is one of the major postulations that will be made in my thesis to argue the ways in which women workers resist exploitation and to delve deeper into the methods and the reasons the methods were chosen. Although they are many scholars who have done academic work the colonial division of labour and its connection to the new international division of labour and global division of labour, I think my work will have a meaningful and novel impact because of how I am able to weave context-specific experiences into the complex, conceptual issues of the main idea.

Earlier this year, I wrote in my thesis proposal that the researcher should develop a close connection with her participants and I was asked to expound. This is exactly what I mean. It means more than internalizing and interpreting what was said, how it was said and who said it. It means that my identity became that of a worker (Hernandez-Kelly, 1983).

 

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Tina Renier is currently pursuing a Masters in International Development at Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Canada. Her area of specialization is labour and development.   

Sources

Belen, E. and Bose, A. (1990).  From Structural Sub-ordination to Empowerment: Women and Development in Third World contexts. Gender and Society, 8 (3). pp. 299-320.

Carter, K. (1997).Why Workers Won’t Work: The Workers in a Developing Economy: Case Study of Jamaica. London and Basingtoke: MacMillan Education Limited.

Hernandez-Kelly, P. (1983). For We are sold, I and My people: Women and Industry in Mexico’s Frontier.Albany, New York: United States of America. Sony Press.

With the likes of John Bolton and Elliot Abrams directing US foreign policy, the US government has abandoned all pretense of “plausible denial” for its illegal regime-change initiatives. The “humanitarian” bombs may not be falling but, make no mistake, the US is waging a full-bore war against the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela.

Back in 1998, Venezuela had had nearly a half a century of two-party rule. A duopoly, not unlike the Republican and Democratic parties in the US, alternated in power imposing a neoliberal order. Poor and working people experienced deteriorating conditions of austerity regardless of which party was in power.

Then third-party candidate Hugo Chávez was elected president. He initiated what has become known as the Bolivarian Revolution, which has inspired the peoples of the world while engendering the enmity of both the US imperialists and the Venezuelan elites.

This article explores the contributions, shortcomings, and lessons of the Bolivarian Revolution’s two decades, in the context of the US regime-change efforts from its inception to current attempts by the US to install the unelected Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s president.

1. Forging a new national identity based on a people’s history. History, it is said, is written by the victors. The historical narrative typically reflects the class that enslaved the Africans, dispossessed the Indigenous, and exploited the workers. There are exceptions. In the US, we have the legacy of Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States.

In Venezuela, Chávez revised his country’s history and thereby wrought a sea change of national consciousness. Prior to Chávez, Venezuela was arguably the most pro-US country in South America. Miami was looked to for cultural affirmation; baseball was the national pastime.

Chávez took special inspiration from the leader of the South American struggle against Spanish colonialism and named his project after Simón Bolívar, known as the “Liberator.” Bolívar was not merely a national leader, but a true internationalist. The Bolivarian project is about the integration of nations based on mutual respect and sovereignty. Bolívar presciently declared in 1829: “The United States appears to be destined by Providence to plague Latin America with misery in the name of liberty.”

This new Venezuelan national identity and consciousness, based on their history told from the bottom up, may prove to be the most lasting legacy of the Bolivarian Revolution.

2. Inclusive society. Fundamental to the Bolivarian project has been the inclusion of the formerly dispossessed: especially women, people of color, and youth.

As professor of Latin American history at NYU Greg Grandin observed, this inclusiveness has awakened “a deep fear of the primal hatred, racism, and fury of the opposition, which for now is directed at the agents of Maduro’s state but really springs from Chávez’s expansion of the public sphere to include Venezuela’s poor.”

For example, when an opposition demonstration came upon an Afro-descendent street peddler, he was presumed to be a chavista because he was dark-skinned and poor. The opposition demonstrators poured gasoline over him and set him on fire. Then the horrific image was posted on social media.

A less gruesome example occurred at the Venezuelan Embassy in Washington, DC. North American activists in solidarity with the Bolivarian government protected the embassy in accordance with international law from being usurped by representatives of US-backed Juan Guaidó for 36 days. Before the protectors were evicted by the US Secret Service on May 16, counter-protesting opposition expatriate Venezuelans would wave bananas at African American solidarity activists, chanting “go back to the zoo.” Such is the racist loathing that fuels the Venezuelan opposition.

3. Special option for poor and working people. Why should a state of all the people have a special option for those who are poor and working? Because these are the people who most need the social welfare services of the state. Billionaires don’t need government schools, hospitals, and housing, but the masses of Venezuelan people do.

The Bolivarian project had halved poverty and cut extreme poverty by two-thirds, while providing free health care and education. On May 27, the United Nations cited Venezuela as one of the top countries for guaranteeing the right to housing, recognizing the over 2.5 million public housing units built.

4. Democracy promotion. The role of a state aspiring to be socialist is not simply to provide social welfare, but to empower the people.

The Bolivarian project has experimented in what is called “protagonistic democracy”: cooperatives, citizens councils, and communes. Some succeeded; others did not.  One of the first priorities was to eradicate illiteracy. The Bolivarian state has promoted community radio stations, low-cost computers, internet cafés for senior citizens, and other venues for popular expression. Venezuela now has one of the highest rates of higher education attendance in the world. These are not the hallmarks of a dictatorship.

5. 21^st century socialism. More than even Bernie Sanders, the Bolivarian Revolution put socialism on the agenda for the 21^st For this we owe the Venezuelans a debt of gratitude, not for providing us with a playbook to be copied, but for demonstrating that the creation of a better world is principally a process.

This was not the primary transgression placing Venezuela in the crosshairs of US imperialism. Promoting socialism may be regarded as blasphemy, but the original sin is the following.

6. Multi-polar world and regional integration. The greatest challenge to the Empire, to the world’s sole superpower, is a multi-polar world based on regional integration. In 1999, Chávez helped strengthen OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries). In 2004, he helped initiate ALBA (Alliance for Our Peoples of America), followed by PetroCaribe in 2005, UNASUR (Union of South American Nations) in 2008, and CELAC (Community of Latin American and Caribbean States) in 2011. Venezuela has consistently demonstrated solidarity with the Palestinian struggle and other oppressed peoples.

When the small fish organize, the big fish gets nasty. Above all, this is why the world’s hegemon has targeted Venezuela.

The traumatic transition from Chávez to Maduro

Chávez, suffering from cancer, died on March 5, 2013. The reaction in Venezuela was polarized. The elites danced in the street. The majority, composed mainly of poor and working people, were traumatized.

The bully to the north, smelling blood, saw an opportunity. The US had conspired to overthrow the Bolivarian Revolution from the beginning, backing a short-lived coup in 2002 followed by a boss’s strike. With the passing of Chávez, the imperialist offensive doubled down.

A snap election was called according to the Venezuelan Constitution for April 14 to replace the deceased president. Chávez, anticipating his demise, had designated Nicolás Maduro as his successor. Although polls had shown Maduro with a 10% lead going into the election campaign, he won with a narrow 1.5% margin.

I was in Caracas as an election observer when Maduro won. My observation of the election was like that of former US President Jimmy Carter, who had declared a year before that of the 92 elections the Carter Center had observed, “The election process in Venezuela is the best in the world.”

Within minutes of the announcement of Maduro’s victory, the main opposition candidate, Henrique Capriles, came on TV to denounce the election as fraudulent and call on the people to “show their rage.” Thus began the opposition’s violent offensive, the guarimbas, to achieve by violence what they could not achieve in democratic elections.

The opposition charges of fraud were investigated by Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (CNE) and found groundless, based on a 100% audit of the electronic vote backed up with paper receipts. Capriles still maintained the charge of fraud, and the US became the sole nation to refuse to recognize the Maduro presidency. The opposition violence continued, taking over 40 lives.

Upon assuming the presidency, Maduro inherited existing problems of crime, inefficiency, corruption, inflation, and a dysfunctional currency exchange system. These were problems that existed during the Chávez period and even prior to that. These problems persist in varying degrees to the present, despite concerted programs to address them.

President Maduro has had his feet held to the fire by the imperialists from the get-go. Far from having a respite, shortly into his presidency, Venezuela was hit with petroleum prices plummeting from a high of nearly $125/barrel to a low of close to $25/barrel. Despite efforts to diversify the economy, Venezuela remains dependent on oil exports for most of its foreign exchange, which is used to fund the social programs.

US regime-change war intensifies

The US regime-change war continues to intensify with increasingly harsh sanctions. These unilateral measures are illegal under the charters of the United Nations and the Organization of American States, because they constitute collective punishment. Trump’s security advisor, John Bolton, elucidates: “It’s like in Star Wars, when Darth Vader grips someone. That’s what we’re doing economically with the (Venezuelan) regime.”

In 2013, the US waited until after the presidential election in Venezuela to declare it fraudulent. Taking no chances, the US declared the 2018 election fraudulent four months before it was held. Joining Trump in this rush to pre-judgement were eleven Democratic senators including Bernie Sanders.

The charges of fraud were based on three issues: setting the date of the election, disqualifying opposition parties, and barring opposition candidates. Maduro had continually called for dialogue with the opposition to set the election date. But each time a date was mutually agreed upon, the opposition backed out after their US handlers intervened. As for the disqualified parties, they had lost their ballot status because they had boycotted past elections. They then refused to reapply for ballot status, because their intention was not to participate in the electoral process.

Opposition candidates, namely Leopoldo López and Henrique Capriles, were barred from running, because they had committed criminal acts that warranted their exclusion. López clearly incited violence that resulted in deaths and would have received far harsher treatment had he committed such acts in the US. Capriles was convicted of economic fraud, “administrative irregularities,” during his tenure as a state governor. While the courts found Capriles guilty, this action against a political opponent damaged the Maduro government’s international image.

Overall, the charges of fraud by the radical right opposition were mainly pretenses to delegitimize the upcoming election. However, several moderate opposition candidates did run, defying the US demand that the election be boycotted.

Henri Falcón was the leading opposition candidate to run in 2018, championing a neoliberal platform of privatization, austerity for workers, and subservience to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The US, which would ordinarily gleefully embrace such a platform, instead threatened Falcón with sanctions for breaking the election boycott.

The explanation for this seemingly anomalous behavior by the US government is that the stakes in Venezuela are much higher than just the presidency. The regime-change project is to exterminate the Bolivarian Revolution, reverse its social gains, and return Venezuela to a subservient client state where the world’s largest oil reserves would be freely exploited by US corporations.

Orwellian world of US foreign policy

As CEO of the capitalist world order (that is what is meant by exercising “American world leadership”), then US President Obama declared in 2015 that Venezuela constituted an imminent and extraordinary threat to US national security. He didn’t mean a military or even an economic threat. That would have been preposterous. What Obama was implicitly confirming is that Venezuela poses a “threat of a good example.” Venezuela is at the top of US imperialism’s hit list because of the good things, not for its faults.

President Trump has intensified Obama’s regime-change policies aimed at Venezuela. Condemning the Bolivarian Revolution, Trump opined: “Socialism is not about justice, it’s not about equality, it’s not about lifting up the poor.” Might he have been really thinking of capitalism? His national security advisor John Bolton tweeted that removing the democratically elected President Maduro by violent coup and installing the US-anointed and unelected Guaidó is protecting the Venezuelan constitution.

On the other side of the aisle, Senator Sanders accused Chávez of being a “dead communist dictator.” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez described the US regime-change war as a contest of “authoritarian regime versus democracy,” with the questionable presumption that the US is the democracy.

In the Orwellian terminology of US politicians and corporate media, a fraudulent election is one where the people vote their choice. A dictator is the democratically elected choice of the people. And the so-called dictator is an authoritarian if he resists rather than surrenders to the bullying power.

Surrender does not appear to be on the agenda for the Bolivarian Revolution, with US asset Guaidó forced to negotiate in Norway after his failed coup attempts. Despite the suffocating sanctions and threats of military action, the poor and working people in Venezuela who are most adversely affected by the US war against them remain the strongest supporters of their elected government.

Make Orwell fiction again!

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Roger Harris is a member of the TRANSCEND Network and theimmediate past president of the Task Force on the Americas, a 33-year-old human rights organization in solidarity with the social justice movements of Latin America and the Caribbean. He is active with the Campaign to End US-Canadian Sanctions against Venezuela.

All images in this article are from TMS

Since Climate Change (CC) has been a constant of life on Gaia with the evolution of photosynthesis 3.2 billion years ago and has more complexities than this one essay can address; ergo, this article will explore CO2’s historic contribution to global warming (GW) as well as explore the relationship of Solar Minimum (SM) to Earth’s climate.

Even before the UN-initiated Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) formed in 1988, the common assumption was that carbon dioxide was the key greenhouse gas and that its increases were the driving force solely responsible for rising climate temperatures.  At that time, anthropogenic (human caused) GW was declared to be the existential crisis of our time, that the science was settled and that we, as a civilization, were running out of time.

And yet, in the intervening years, uncertainty remained about GW’s real time impacts which may be rooted in the fact that many of IPCC’s essential climate forecasts of consequence have not materialized as predicted.  Even as the staid Economist magazine recently noted

“Over the past fifteen years, air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse gas emissions have continued to soar.”

Before the IPCC formed, NOAA’s Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii registered co2 levels at under 350 ppm (parts per million) with the explicit warning that if co2 exceeded that number, Mother Earth was in Big Trouble – and there would be no turning back for humanity.  Those alarm bells continue today as co2 levels have risen to 414 ppm as temperatures peaked in 1998.

From the outset, the IPCC controlled the debate by limiting its charter  “to understanding the scientificbasis of risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation.”   

In other words, before any of the science had been done, the IPCC’s assumption was that man-made activity was responsible and that Nature was not an active participantin a process within its own sphere of interest.   As an interdisciplinary topic of multiple diversity, the IPCC is not an authority on all the disciplines of science within the CC domain.   

While there is no dispute among scientists that the Sun and its cyclical output is the true external force driving Earth’s energy and climate system as part of a Sun-centered Universe, the IPCC’s exclusion of the Sun from its consideration can only be seen as a deliberate thwarting of a basic fundamental law of  science, a process which assures a free inquiry based on reason and evidence.  It is the Sun which all planets of the solar system orbit around, that has the strongest gravitational pull in the solar system, is the heaviest of all celestial bodies and its sunspots in relation to Earth’s temperatures has been known since Galileo began drawing sunspots in 1613.  Yet the IPCC which touts a ‘scientific view of climate change’ would have us believe the Sun is irrelevant and immaterial to the IPCC’s world view and Earth’s climate; hardly a blip on their radar.

In the GW debate, co2 is dismissed as a colorless, odorless pollutant that gets little credit as a critical component for its contribution to life on the planet as photosynthesis does not happen without co2.  A constant presence in Earth’s atmosphere since the production of oxygen, all living organisms depend on co2 for its existence. As a net contributor to agriculture, plants absorb co2 as they release oxygen into the atmosphere that we two- and four-leggeds depend on for sustenance and oxygen as necessities for survival on Earth.   There are scientists who believe that Earth has been in a co2 ‘famine’ while others applaud Earth’s higher co2 levels in the last three decades as a regreening of the planet.

While “An Inconvenient Truth” (2006) and “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power” (2016) stage managed the climate question as a thoroughly politicized ‘settled science’ with former veep Al Gore declaring the drama a ‘moral’ issue, there is no room for any preference that does not depend on a rigorous, skeptical, independent investigation based on evidentiary facts rather than the partisan politics of emotion and subjective opinion.  Given the prevalence of weather in our daily lives, it would seem elementary for engaged citizens and budding paleoclimatologists to understand Earth’s ancient climate history and atmosphere in order to gain an informed perspective on Earth’s current and future climate.

As a complicated non-linear system, climate is a variable composition of rhythmic spontaneity with erratic and even chaotic fluctuations making weather predictions near-impossible.  Climate is an average of weather systems over an established long term period while individual weather events indicative of a short term trend are not accurate forecasts of CC.  While ice core readings provide information, they do not show causation of GW but only measure the ratio between co2 and rising temperatures. It is up to scientists to interpret the results.  And that’s where this narrative takes, like ancient weather and climate patterns, an unpredictable turn.

It might be called an inconvenient truth that ‘skeptic’ scientists have known for the last twenty years that the Vostok ice core samples refute co2’s role as a negative and even question its contribution as the major greenhouse gas.  It is no secret to many climate professionals that 95% of the greenhouse effect is due solely to natural water vapor with co2 at 3.6%.

Located at the center of the Antarctica ice sheet, the Vostok Research Center is a collaborative effort where Russian and French scientists collected undisturbed ice core data in the 1990’s to measure the historic presence of carbon dioxide levels.  The Vostok samples provided the first irrefutable evidence of Earth’s climate history for 420,000 year including the existence of four previous glacial and interglacial periods.  Those samples ultimately challenged the earlier premise of co2’s predominant role and that carbon dioxide was not the climate culprit once thought.  It is fair to add that IPCC related scientists believe Vostok to be ‘outliers’ in the GW debate.

The single most significant revelation of the ice core studies has been that GW could not be solely attributed to co2 since carbon dioxide increases occurred after temperature increases and that an extensive ‘lag’ time exists between the two.  Logic and clear thinking demands that cause (co2) precedes the effect (increased temps) is in direct contradiction to the assertion that carbon dioxide has been responsible for pushing higher global temperatures.  Just as today’s 414 ppm precedes current temps which remain within the range of normal variability.

Numerous peer-reviewed studies confirmed that co2 lags behind temperature increases, originally by as much as 800 years. That figure was later increased to 8,000 years and by 2017 the lag time between co2 and temperature had been identified as 14,000 years.  As if a puzzlement from the Quantum world, it is accepted that CO2and temperatures are correlated as they rise and fall together, yet are separated by a lag time of thousands of year.

What is obscure from public awareness in the GW shuffle is that geologic records have identified CC as a naturally occurring cycle with glacial periods of 100,000 year intervals that are interrupted by brief, warming interglacial periods lasting 15,000-20,000 years. Those interglacial periods act as a temperate respite from what is the world’s natural normal Ice Age environment. Within those glacial and interglacial periods are cyclical subsets of global cooling and warming just as today’s interglacial warm period began at the end of the Pleistocene Ice Age about 12,000 years ago.   Since climate is not a constant, check these recent examples of Earth’s climate subsets:

• 200 BC – 600 AD – Roman warming cycle
• 440 – 950                  Dark Ages cool cycle
• 950 – 1300                Medieval warming cycle
• 1300 – 1850              Renaissance Little Ice Age
• 1850 – Present          Modern warming cycle

In addition, climate records have shown that peak co2 temperatures from the past are relative to today’s co2 level without the addition of a fossil fuel contribution.  For instance, just as today’s measurement at 414 ppm contains a ‘base’ co2 level of approximately 300 ppm as recorded in the 19th century, any co2 accumulation over 300 ppm would be considered anthropogenic (man-made) and be portrayed as “historic” or ‘alarmingly high’ and yet remain statistically insignificant compared to historic co2 norms.

During the last 600 million years, only the Carboniferous period and today’s Holocene Epoch  each witnessed co2 levels at less than 400 ppm.  During the Early Carboniferous Period, co2 was at 1500 ppm with average temperatures comparable to 20 C; 68 F before diving to 350 ppm during the Mid Carboniferous period with a reduced temperature of 12 C;54F.   In other words, current man-made contributions to co2 are less than what has been determined to be significant.

Contrary to the IPCC’s stated goal, NASA recognizes that “All weather on Earth, from the surface of the planet into space, begins with the Sun” and that weather experienced on Earth’s surface is “influenced by the small changes the Sun undergoes during its solar cycle.”

A Solar Minimum (SM) is a periodic 11 year solar cycle normally manifesting a weak magnetic field with increased radiation and cosmic rays while exhibiting decreased sunspot activity that, in turn, decreases planetary temperatures.  Today’s solar cycle is referred to as the Grand Minimum which, according to NOAA, predicts reductions from the typical 140 – 220 sunspots per solar cycle to 95 – 130 sunspots.

As the Sun is entering “one of the deepest Solar Minima of the Space Age,” a NASA scientist predicted a SM that could ”set a Space Age record for cold” but has recently clarified his statement as it applies only to the Thermosphere.  In October, 2018, NOAA predicted “Winter Outlook favors Warmer Temperature for much of the US,” as above-normal precipitation and record freezing temperatures were experienced throughout the country.

As of this writing, with the Sun noticeably intense, Earth has experienced 23 consecutive days without sunspots for a 2019 total of 96 spotless days at 60%.  In 2018, 221 days were spotless at 61%.   Spaceweather.com monitors sunspot (in)activity.

With the usual IPCC and Non-IPCC split, the SM is expected to be at its lowest by 2020 with a peak between 2023 and 2026 as it exhibits counterintuitive erratic weather anomalies including cooler temps due to increased cloud cover, higher temps due to solar sunspot-free brilliance, potential electrical events,  heavy rain and flooding and drought, a shorter growing season, impacts on agriculture and food production systems or it may all be a walk in the park with shirt sleeves in January.

While there is clearly an important climate shift occurring even as the role of co2 and human activity as responsible entities remains problematic, the elimination of co2 and its methane sidekick would be exceedingly beneficial for a healthy planet.  It is time to allow scientists to be scientists without political agendas or bureaucratic interference as the Sun and Mother Earth continue in their orbit as they have for eons of millennia.

As Earth’s evolutionary climate cycles observe the Universal law of the natural world, the Zero Point Field, which produces an inexhaustible source of ‘free’ energy that Nikola Tesla spoke of, is the means by which inter stellar vehicles travel through time/space.  The challenge for ingenious, motivated Earthlings is to harness and extract the ZPF proclaiming a new planetary age of technological innovation with no rapacious industry, no pollution, no shortages, no gas guzzlers and no war.

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Renee Parsons has been a member of the ACLU’s Florida State Board of Directors and president of the ACLU Treasure Coast Chapter. She has been an elected public official in Colorado, an environmental lobbyist for Friends of the Earth and staff member of the US House of Representatives in Washington DC. She can be found on Twitter @reneedove31.

 

The use of armed drones is presented as a ‘risk-free’ solution to security problems. Through using remotely-controlled aircraft to take out bad guys far away from our shores, we are told, we are keeping the public as well as our armed forces safe. The reality, however, is that drones are liable to increase insecurity, not reduce it.

Lowering the threshold for the use of force

Politicians know that the public do not like to see young men and women sent overseas to fight in wars which often have remote and unclear aims.  Potential TV footage of grieving families awaiting funeral corteges has been a definite restraint on political leaders weighing up the option of military intervention. Take away that potential political cost, however, by using unmanned systems, and it makes it much easier – perhaps too easy –  for politicians to opt for a quick, short-term ‘fix’ of ‘taking out the bad guys’ rather than engaging in the often difficult and long-term work of solving the root causes of conflicts through diplomatic and political means.

Transferring the risk and cost of war from soldiers to civilians

Keeping ‘our boys’ safe through using remotely-controlled drones to launch air strikes comes at a price. Without ‘boots on the ground’ air strikes are inherently more dangerous for civilians on the ground. Despite claims of the defence industry and advocates of drone warfare, it is simply not possible to know precisely what is happening on the ground from thousands of miles away.  While the UK claims, for example, that only one civilian was killed in the thousands of British air and drone strikes in Iraq and Syria, journalist and casualty recording organisations have reported thousands of deaths in Coalition airstrikes.

It is also hard not to connect the awful terrorist attacks that have taken place here in the UK and in Europe to these military interventions. While the public as well as senior military and security officials understand that there is a clear link between military intervention and terror attacks at home, politicians continue to baulk at the connection. The reality though, as Air Marshall Greg Bagwell argued told us

“When you have an asymmetric advantage, enemies seek to find a way around it, and that is what terrorism is.  There is a danger that you shift the way an enemy target you and looks for vulnerabilities, and that is where we find ourselves.”

Expanding the use of ‘targeted killing’

Perhaps the most controversial aspect of armed drones has been their use by the United States, Israel and the UK for targeted killing.  Legal scholars define targeted killing as the deliberate, premeditated killing of selected individuals by a state who are not in their custody.  Where International Humanitarian Law (the Laws of War) applies, targeted killing of combatants may be legal. Outside of IHL situations, International Human Rights Law applies and lethal force may only be used when absolutely necessary to save human life that is in imminent danger.  This does not appear to be the case for many of the drone targeted killing that have been carried out, for example, by the US in Pakistan and Yemen.

While some argue that it is the policy of targeted killing that is wrong, not the weapon used to carry out it out, it is very difficult to imagine that the wholesale expansion of targeted killing would have occurred without the technology.  In the UK, campaigners have long been calling on the government to set out its policy on the use of armed drones outside a situation of armed conflict, something the government has so far refused to do.

Enabling video-game warfare

Separate, but connected to the idea that drones lower the threshold for using lethal forces is the notion, as Philip Alston the former Special Rapporteur on extra judicial killing, put it of the ‘PlayStation mentality’.  Alston and others suggest that the vast physical distance between those operating armed drones and the target makes that act of killing much easier. The physical distance induces a kind of psychological ‘distancing’.

There are strong objections to this notion, particular by those involved. Drone pilots, it is argued, are highly trained professionals that are able to distinguish between a video games and real life. Furthermore, it is widely reported that some drone pilots are suffering from post-traumatic stress from having to see the results of their strikes, hardly an indication of detachment.  On the other hand, there is some evidence for a ‘PlayStation’ mentality. In 2010 an Afghan convoy of vehicles was hit by an US airstrike involving drones in which 23 civilians were killed. A subsequent USAF investigation found that the Predator crew wanted to attack and “ignored or downplayed” evidence suggesting the convoy was not a hostile target.  Elsewhere, in Dr Peter Lee’s recent book, Reaper Force, containing detailed interviews with British RAF Reaper crews, several talked about missions where they became fixated on a target and were ready to strike despite the presence of civilians. Only direct intervention from others meant the strikes did not take place.

Seducing us with the myth of ‘precision’

Drones permit, we are told, pin-point accurate air strikes that kill the target while leaving the innocent untouched. Drone advocates seduce us with the notion that we can achieve control over the chaos of war through technology.  The reality is that there is no such thing as a guaranteed accurate airstrike  While laser-guided weapons are without doubt much more accurate than they were even 20 or 30 years ago, the myth of guaranteed precision is just that, a myth.  Even under test conditions, only 50% of weapons are expected to hit within their ‘circular error of probability’. Once the blast radius of weapons is taken into account and indeed how such systems can be affected by things such as the weather, it is clear that ‘precision’ cannot by any means be assured.

Politicians and defence officials too have been seduced by the myth of precision war and are opening up areas that would previously been out of bounds – due to the presence of civilians – to air strikes.  Perhaps most telling, internal military data which counters the prevailing narrative that drones are better than traditional piloted aircraft is simply classified.

Ushering in permanent war

Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of the rise of remote, drone warfare is that it is ushering in a state of permanent/forever war.  With no (or very few) troops deployed on the ground and when air strikes can be carried out with impunity by drone operators who then commute home at the end of the day, there is little public or political pressure to bring interventions to an end.

Drones are enabling states to carry out attacks with seemingly little reference to international law norms. US law professor Rosa Brooks argued in a disturbing article in Foreign Policy that ‘there’s no such thing as peacetime’ anymore. “Since 9/11,” she writes “it has become virtually impossible to draw a clear distinction between war and not-war.” Rather than challenging the erosion of the boundaries between crucially distinct legal frameworks, Brooks argues that we must simply accept that “the Forever War is here to stay.” To do otherwise she maintains is “largely a waste of time and energy. “Wartime is the only time we have” she insists.

The slide towards forever war must be rejected and resisted. It is incumbent on us all, citizen, politician, military officer, to work towards global peace and security, not permanent warfare.

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All images in this article are from Drone Wars

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This Outlaw Power: America’s Intent is to Dominate China, Russia and the World

By Christopher Black, June 10, 2019

On May 30th the US Department of Defense released its strategy paper for the Indo-Pacific region in which, after several pages of lies about its role in the world as savior and benefactor, set out America’s intentions to dominate China and Russia. It is another item of evidence that the United States government and its allies are conspiring to commit crimes against peace by planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression against those nations.

Haiti, the Silent Chaos!

By Joël Léon, June 10, 2019

June 9^th 2019, more than 1 million people were on the street asking peacefully “Kote Kob Petwokaribe a” (where is the Petrocaribe money). Police forces step in killing 7 people and injuring 147, 70 were arrested. The chaos is continuing!

European Customers Are “Abandoning” UK Firms as Manufacturing Figures Sink

By Jack Peat, June 10, 2019

Signs that European customers are “abandoning” UK firms are starting to show after British manufacturing recorded the steepest downturn in almost three years.

Trump’s Justice Department Preparing “Additional Indictment” Against Assange. Currently Facing 18 Spurious Charges

By Stephen Lendman, June 10, 2019

Arresting and imprisoning him in the UK was all about holding him for extradition to the US — his mistreatment an assault on fundamental speech, media and academic freedoms, Britain and hardliners in Washington want eliminated.

Sudan: Chaos Unleashed. Color Revolution

By Andrew Korybko, June 10, 2019

The ongoing events in Sudan are a perfect example of the uncontrollable chaos that can be unleashed in society following a Color Revolution, with it now becoming almost impossible to predict how the latest crisis will be resolved, if ever.

What “Everyone Knows” About D-Day

By Prof Susan Babbitt, June 10, 2019

Gould knocks out one peg of that ideology: an idea of reason.  Evolution has no final purpose, Gould argued. It aims for no ideal. Yet if you wind back the tape of evolution to any point, the next steps are constrained by myriad causal factors.[ii] Gould used the word “contingency”. It means dependence.

Prime Minister of Poland Signs Global Appeal to Stop 5G Telecommunications Transmission

By Julian Rose, June 10, 2019

In what is surely an unprecedented and  groundbreaking action, the Prime Minister of Poland, Mateusz Morawiecki, has personally backed an International Appeal to stop the controversial roll-out of 5G electro magnetic microwave telecommunication transmissions.

The Downing of Malaysian Airlines MH17: Mahathir Opens a “Ukraine Political Pandora’s Box”

By F. William Engdahl, June 10, 2019

Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad sent shock waves in a public speech where he dismissed a Dutch “official” report blaming Russia for the downing of Malaysia Air Flight 17 in July, 2014, weeks after a CIA-led coup toppled the elected President of Ukraine.

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A parable for US times. So busy with bombs, wars, sanctions, walls, that humans are relegated to the 15th century. – Felicity Arbuthnot

Despite hundreds of millions of dollars flowing through Los Angeles to stem the rising tide of homelessness, a resurgence of medieval diseases has the city – and neighboring states – on edge. Typhoid fever and typhus, borne by fleas, body lice, and feces, are turning the once glitzy and glamorous city into a third-world worthy environment. Yes, Typhoid Mary is back, in a sense, living on the streets and wreaking havoc on unsuspecting people in the Golden State.

These diseases, along with an uptick in tuberculosis, hepatitis A, and staph, are easily and rapidly spread and have wide-reaching consequences. They’re highly contagious and can infect anyone through casual contact.

An LAPD officer was recently diagnosed with typhoid, and several other city employees are exhibiting the classic symptoms of high fever, muscle pain, and weakness. Left untreated, the disease can be fatal – and let’s face it: The malady wiped out entire populations during the Dark Ages and took a heavy toll on American Civil War soldiers and early American settlers. Some historians blame the malaise for obliterating the Jamestown settlement.

Where The Heck Did They Come From?

Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority recently released a report showing 59,000 people living on the streets in Los Angeles County – a 12% increase since 2018 – with 36,300 of them within the city limits of Los Angeles. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), reports that “California accounted for 30% of all people experiencing homelessness as individuals” throughout the United States.

The progress of these once eradicated and near eradicated diseases is so alarming that the politicians who once spent copious amounts of time covering up the warts and putrid pustules in their liberally run cities and state are now showing disbelief and disgust. California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) broke his silence during his state of the state speech in February:

“Our homeless crisis is increasingly becoming a public-health crisis. Typhus, a medieval disease. In California. In 2019.”

Los Angeles Mayor Gil Garcetti (D), who many believed would be a 2020 presidential contender, calls the crisis, “the biggest heartbreak for me and my city.” Garcetti campaigned extensively for the initiative known as Proposition HHH, which designated $1.2 billion over the next ten years to build homeless housing. But now residents are howling about the pricey plan’s abject failure. One local L.A. news outlet polled residents and found that “Forty-five percent said it’s failing, with 18 percent saying it’s a complete failure.”

Voters passed Propositions 47 (2014) and 57 (2016), downgrading theft and drug offenses to misdemeanors and redefining many felonies from violent to nonviolent to release a horde of inmates – some addicted to drugs and suffering from now untreated mental illness. And they wonder why there are so many people on the streets living, sleeping, and breathing surrounded by urine-soaked sidewalks and piles of human feces? And, of course, they don’t have to show symptoms to carry and transfer these diseases – simple casual contact from a carrier will do just fine.

Asymptomatic Mary Mallon was presumed to have infected over 50 people between 1907 and 1915, yet never experienced a day of sickness. She died under quarantine – from complications of a stroke, not typhoid. Her body was cremated and her ashes interred, but her legacy as Typhoid Mary lives on.

What’s The Plan?

Garcetti is doubling down on his homeless housing project, but his highest hurdle is his choice for building sites. It seems no Angeleno wants drugs, typhus, and hepatitis bubbling and festering on their own block. A short story made long, aside from Proposition HHH, there is no solid plan to curb the worsening rotting of Los Angeles.

There is a long-held belief that two American presidents succumbed to Typhoid. The ninth Commander in Chief, William Henry Harrison, is remembered to have died of pneumonia after only 31 days in office, but recent studies suggest he likely died from typhoid. Number 12, President Zachary Taylor, was most likely felled from the disease as well – due to the unsanitary conditions in the Swamp in the mid-19^th century. Ironically, the only thing that seems to have changed in Washington, D.C. is that the deadly infections are in the heart and soul and not the body of the toadies on the Hill.

Here we are in the throes of the 21^st century with running water, inoculations for just about every known malady of the last millennia, and welfare programs to heal the poorest of our citizens. Yet Los Angeles remains a hot, malodorous, infectious mess – and it could be spreading toward a city near you.

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National Columnist at LibertyNation.com. Sarah Cowgill has been a writer in the political and corporate worlds for over 25 years. As a sought-after speech writer, her clients included CEOs, U.S. Senators, Congressmen, Governors, and even a Vice President. She’s worked as Contributing Editor at Scottsdale Life, a news reporter for the Journal and Courier, and guest opinion political writer for numerous publications nationwide. A born storyteller, Sarah has published a full-length book and is currently finishing a quirky, sarcastic, second novel.

On June 4th the Chinese government issued a travel alert for Chinese tourists thinking of visiting the United States, a day after it issued a similar advisory to Chinese students thinking of studying in the US over concerns for their safety and security. Chinese in the US are reporting harassment and interrogations by US immigration authorities and many now have the impression they are not welcome in the US.

The Global Times, speaking on behalf of the government stated,

“The Chinese people find it difficult to accept the fact that they are being taken as thieves. The US boasts too much superiority and has been indulged by the world. Due to its short history, it lacks understanding of and respect for the rules of countries and laws of the market. The Americans of the early generations accumulated prosperity and prestige for the US, while the current US administration behaves like a wastrel generation by ruining the world’s respect for the US.”

It seems to me they are being generous to the US since the “early prosperity” of the US was built on the backs of slave labour, extermination of the indigenous peoples and theft of their lands, colonization and exploitation of other countries, including China, and two hundred years of continual warfare to secure the resources and markets of first the western hemisphere, then the world. Their “prestige” comes out of the barrel of a gun. The US economic and military aggression against those nations that refuse to obey American demands to serve their interests ever increases and never abates. A few days ago Mike Pompeo stated, with feigned innocence, that the US was willing to talk to Iran “without preconditions” when the real conditions Iran faces include an almost total embargo of its trade and threats of immediate attack by US forces, including nuclear attack. The Iranians quickly rejected this hypocrisy.

In the Balkans the US and its NATO war machine have again stirred up problems in Serbia where, in the NATO occupied province of Kosovo-Metohija, Serbs and Russians were detained and beaten up by Albanian security forces designed to put further pressure on Serbia to fall into the NATO camp so that the NATO machine will have complete control of the Balkans to complete the encirclement of Russia. The war goes on in Syria, goes on in Ukraine, goes on in Afghanistan. The terrible situation of the Palestinians becomes even worse as the US plans the final solution for them-their disappearance as a people to be absorbed as citizens of other states, while Israel continues its aggressive expansion and acts as agent of the US bully in the region; the threats against Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea continue.

But the principle preoccupation of the US is still China and Russia. On May 30th the US Department of Defense released its strategy paper for the Indo-Pacific region in which, after several pages of lies about its role in the world as savior and benefactor, set out America’s intentions to dominate China and Russia. It is another item of evidence that the United States government and its allies are conspiring to commit crimes against peace by planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression against those nations. These designs by the American leadership reflect not only the desire of the owners of capital in the US to dominate the world. They also reflect the Americans’ preoccupation with themselves as “exceptional” people, as the “exceptional” nation, above all others, answerable to none, which has been a characteristic of their culture since its foundation.

The aggressive objectives of the successive American governments were and are not accidents or mistakes arising out of immediate political circumstances but are a deliberate and necessary part of American foreign policy. From its inception the American political leadership has claimed to unite the American people with a consciousness of their mission and destiny to dominate the world. War is seen as inevitable or highly probable to accomplish these objectives where intimidation and bribery fail.

To accomplish its objectives the United States has done all it can to disrupt the world order established after World War Two when world nations joined together for world peace in the United Nations Charter in 1946. Within 3 years the US set up the NATO military alliance to threaten the Soviet Union, soon waged wars across south east Asia and overthrew governments the world over. The rise to power of President Trump has resulted in the United States withdrawing from a series of treaties designed to reduce the threat of war and of nuclear armaments, or promote free trade, in order to free the United States from its obligations under the treaties involved to allow it to pursue its objectives using any means necessary. They have rejected international law and diplomacy in interstate relationships and now rely on threats and violence.

The Indo-Pacific Strategy Report, of June 1, 2019 begins with the claim that,

“Inter-state strategic competition, defined by geopolitical rivalry between free and repressive world order visions, is the primary concern for U.S. national security. In particular, the People’s Republic of China, under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, seeks to reorder the region to its advantage by leveraging military modernization, influence operations, and predatory economics to coerce other nations.”

Time and again the Report ascribes to China the actual behavior of the United States for is it not the United States that has sought to reorder the world since it became a world power; has it not used all these methods and more to coerce other nations? The world knows it. Yet once again their sense of being exceptional makes them blind to their stupefying arrogance and hypocrisy.

The Report then warns that,

“We will not accept policies or actions that threaten or undermine the rules-based international order – an order that benefits all nations. We are committed to defending and enhancing these shared values”.

What they mean by “rules based international order” is not the order of international law as accepted by the world governments in the United Nations Charter and other international agreements but a US imposed international order, – an order that does not yet exist except in the fantasies of these gangsters-but which they never stop trying to impose on the world, an order of militarism, fear, and tyranny for the rest of the world.

The balance of the Report sets out their strategy of building up a “networked region” that is, a US controlled system of vassal states to prepare for war with China by prepositioning ammunition, equipment, logistics supplies, transportation networks, intelligence sharing and rapid deployment of forces to threaten China. The vassal states; Japan, South Korea, Australia New Zealand, Canada, Indonesia, The Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, Taiwan, are all patted on the head for assisting the United States and promised they will be rewarded with peace and prosperity so long as they accept their subservient role to the saintly United States. Other southeast Asia nations are referred to as potential “partners” for the future as they try to brag that they have Vietnam, India, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Laos and Cambodia on their side when all they have are courtesy arrangements and cooperation on a low level that all nations have with each other. Their vision of their influence is greater than the reality.

But the three targets remain the same for according to the Report, China is a “Revisionist Power, ”Russia is a “Revitalized Malign Actor,” while the DPRK, keeps its status as a “Rogue State,” all of which the Americans claim are intent on challenging their fictional “rules based order.” There then follows, in each case, paragraph after paragraph of distortions of the facts about the nature and behavior of these three nations so that one feels compelled to break into laughter when reading these ludicrous labels that seem to come from a very bad 1950’s Hollywood film script.

But finally, after all the verbiage, they get down to it and set out their real objectives by referencing the US Defense Strategy of 2018 which sets out the four pillars of their hegemonic designs:

1. Defend the Homeland;

This is a curious phrase we have been seeing the past number of years in American parlance, this concept of ‘homeland,” but in contradistinction to what is never stated. Well, the to the rest of the world, of course, which they now consider their lands as well, their outlands, and so the need for a phrase to identify the US as the “homeland”. What could more display their colonial mindset than the use of this phrase?

2. Remain the preeminent military power in the world;

This is a threat to the world, to humankind, and can only be maintained by the pauperization of its own people.

3. Ensure the balances of power in key regions remain in our favour;

Meaning that they intend to keep playing one nation off against another and create chaos where necessary, to play both sides against the middle, whatever it takes so that the United States maintains the ruling hand,

4. Advance an international order that is most conducive to our security and prosperity

And here we have their principle objective, meaning that, despite all the rhetoric about shared values, shared goals and friendships with its vassal allies, the world is meant to enrich and serve the United States.

To make sure the world knows of their power and what they are willing to do with it the Report states,

“In the region, US INDOPACOM currently has more than 2,000 aircraft; 200 ships and submarines; and more than 370,000 Soldiers, Sailors, Marines, Airmen, DoD civilians, and contractors assigned within its area of responsibility. The largest concentration of forces in the region are in Japan and the ROK. A sizable contingent of forces (more than 5,000 on a day-to-day basis) are also based in the U.S. territory of Guam, which serves as a strategic hub supporting crucial operations and logistics for all U.S. forces operating in the Indo-Pacific region. Other allies and partners that routinely host U.S. forces on a smaller scale include the Philippines, Australia, Singapore, and the United Kingdom through the island of Diego Garcia”. Other bases are planned in Australia and New Guinea.

In describing its relations and military cooperation with its vassal allies it places special emphasis on Taiwan and uses language that in direct terms violates the One China Policy of China, which the US pays lip service to. It is tantamount to a declaration that Taiwan is a US protectorate instead of an integral part of China.

They state,

“The objective of our defense engagement with Taiwan is to ensure that Taiwan remains secure, confident, free from coercion, and able to peacefully and productively engage the mainland on its own terms.”

So when US, Australian, French, or British naval forces claim they are traversing the Straight of Taiwan as an exercise in “freedom of navigation” we know that what they are really doing is using force to divide China, to treat it as if it were still the weak China of the 19th century when American gunboats until as late as 1949 ran up and down the Yangtze River as if they owned it; to slap it in the face, to dare it with insults.

The situation has become so tense that the Global Times on June 6,th in an op ed by Wei Jianguo, said,

“China is able to withstand US maximum pressure, due to the country’s economic resilience, and Chinese people’s resolute determination. Suffering from a century of humiliation, the Chinese nation has been accustomed to such pressure, as shown in the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression, as well as the Korean War or the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea. The unity of Chinese people is a vital reason for the country’s fundamental victory in history.”

The Peoples’ Daily stated, “America is the enemy of the world.”

Russia and China, in their defence, are intensifying their economic and military cooperation but the threat remains and is increasing. The answer may lie in the fact that the US strategy is ultimately self-defeating. The more they try to dominate the world, the more intense the resistance becomes. Even their alliances are coming apart at the seams as the thieves bicker about their share of the loot. But the question remains, what to do about this enemy of the world, this outlaw power.

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Christopher Black is an international criminal lawyer based in Toronto. He is known for a number of high-profile war crimes cases and recently published his novel “Beneath the Clouds. He writes essays on international law, politics and world events, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.” He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from NEO

In recent months a debate over whether a global insect apocalypse is underway has raged in the mainstream media and among researchers. To assess the range of scientific opinion, Mongabay interviewed 24 entomologists and other scientists working on six continents, in more than a dozen countries, to better determine what we know, what we don’t, and, most importantly, what we should do about it.

This is part two of a four-part exclusive series by Mongabay senior contributor Jeremy Hance. Read Part I, “A global look at a deepening crisis” here.

Tyson Wepprich, a postdoctoral research associate at Oregon State University, was only supposed to be looking at the presence or absence of butterfly species in Ohio. But news of insect decline, in blockbuster studies from Germany and Puerto Rico, changed his plans. His team is now also looking hard at overall abundance — and the early results aren’t good.

“The trends are similar to those in long-term European butterfly monitoring where abundance, summed across all species, is declining at around 2 percent per year,” he says of the team’s unpublished work, and “about twice as many species are declining rather than increasing.”

Wepprich’s ongoing research is just another sign that something may be seriously amiss with the world’s insects — something some entomologists have privately suspected, but which they are only now beginning to prove and publish about.

“I used to think of conservation as policies to save rare species from extinction,” Wepprich says, but adds he now believes conserving abundance must also be a part of any successful environmental strategy.

A “typical malaise [trap] catch in the good old days” before insect decline swept Western Europe, as described by researcher Hans de Kroon. Malaise traps are the typical traps used to capture insects over time. Image by the Entomological Society Krefeld.

Insects: A conservation black hole

Despite the fact that arthropods make up most of the species on Earth, and much of the planet’s biomass, they are significantly understudied compared to mammals, plants, birds, amphibians, reptiles, fish and much else.

The IUCN Red List, for example, has assessed just 8,131 insect species regarding their extinction risk, a mere 0.8 percent of known insect species (the Red List estimates around a million insect species have been described). By contrast, the list has assessed 100 percent of all known mammals and birds. Moreover, today, nearly 300 years after Carl Linnaeus devised the system of taxonomy, we’ve only identified a small fraction of all the insect species inhabiting our world.

Conservation of insects, even of well-known species, has also lagged well behind conservation of other taxonomic groups. This is likely due to a philanthropic reality: it has proven far easier to raise funds for tigers, panda bears and whales than for glacier fleas, oleander hawk moths, or exploding ants. There are, of course, some conservation groups that focus solely on insects, like the Xerxes Society in the U.S., or Buglife in the U.K. But they’re far smaller and less well funded than those focused on big charismatic mammals or birds popular with the public. Millions of people call themselves “birders”; far fewer claim to be “insecters.”

In truth, for most of modern conservation history, environmentalists haven’t really worried much about insect conservation; the assumption has long been that if you protect umbrella species (also known as keystone or flagship species) in a landscape, you’ll be conserving all else as well. But new research by entomologists is clearly showing that’s no longer the case.

Warning shot: Confirming EU insect decline

No insect groups on Earth have been more thoroughly studied than those in Europe, including in the U.K., where none other than Charles Darwin himself made considerable contributions to the field of entomology.

So it’s no surprise that the first news of a so-called insect apocalypse came from Western Europe in a groundbreaking, eye-opening, and stunning paper that exploded on the scene in October 2017. It found that flying insects in 63 protected areas in Germany had declined by 75 percent in just 25 years. The study was built on the meticulous records of amateur entomologists. To date, this is the strongest data we have on insect declines in temperate areas.

But German amateurs aren’t the only ones with good long-term records. The UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme has been keeping annual tabs on butterflies for 43 years, and over that time two-thirds of the nations’ species have decreased. Meanwhile, a recent report on Scottish moths found that their abundance dropped by 46 percent in just 25 years. While these data points are useful and deeply concerning, they say nothing about the vast majority of less charismatic insects, or about insect abundance across ecosystems.

“We do not have much proper research [in Europe] for most taxa, except butterflies, bees and maybe Odonata [dragonflies and damselflies],” says Pedro Cardoso, a University of Helsinki ecology professor who studies insects.

But Axel Ssymank, an entomologist with the German Federal Agency for Nature Conservation, says he fears the collapse of insects in the EU, though far from conclusive to date, is likely to be confirmed. He notes that ongoing monitoring at several EU sites has resulted in similar findings to the Germany study: species that were abundant only 10 to 20 years ago are now “extremely rare or vanished.” Ssymank, who specializes in hoverflies, says he has seen drops of 80 percent in hoverfly abundance in lowland valleys.

“Obviously, not only the big insects, like some large butterflies, are heavily declining, but also the tiny ones, regardless of body size, but with an amazing variation between even closely related species,” he says.

The German research team responsible for the 2017 abundance study is continuing its work. Co-author Hans de Kroon, a plant ecologist with Radboud University in the Netherlands, says he and his colleagues are now interested not only in ongoing monitoring of the populations in the German reserves, but also in finding out how insect declines are impacting other species, particularly birds. They also plan to use DNA barcoding to get a better sense of how particular insect species are faring compared to others.

He adds that researchers in neighboring nations are uncovering similar findings to those first reported in Germany. Long-term data sets in his home country of the Netherlands, for example, show “the same declines of say 50, 60, and 70 percent decline over say a 30-year time span.”

A paper appearing in June in the journal Biological Conservation found an incredible 84 percent decline in butterflies in the Netherlands from 1890 to 2017; in reality, the authors write, “the loss is likely even higher.”

“The pattern is getting confirmed all the time, and it’s not so much of a surprise [now] because [the Germany study] really looked at a large number of sites over a big variety of different habitats,” de Kroon notes. “It’s very typical of a Western European landscape.”

He suggests that such declines will also be confirmed in North America, where climate and habitat are most similar to Western Europe.

“This is what seems to be going on.”

North American decline?

In North America, insect news has long been dominated by colony collapse disorder: the abandonment en masse of honeybee hives, a phenomenon that began to get attention in the early 2000s. Despite nearly two decades of research, the causes of hive failures are still not known, but likely suspects include parasites, disease, habitat loss and pesticides — or some combination of these. More recently, colony collapse concern has been exacerbated by fears of pollinator declines. But even in the U.S., research on pollinators, let alone the less charismatic insects that make up the wealth of abundance and diversity, lags far behind that done in Europe.

Neither the U.S. nor Canada have conducted an in-depth study similar to that done in Germany. One could point to recent research in Puerto Rico, considered part of North America, that found insect populations had utterly collapsed in a tropical rainforest. But given that the habitat in the study is so different from most of North America, it’s a more useful analogue for the Neotropics than North America.

“Unfortunately we do not yet have a clear understanding of how insect populations are changing in North America,” says Corrie Moreau, an entomologist who specializes in ants at Cornell University. “Although museum collections and previously published studies can inform us of past diversity and abundance, we need new sampling efforts to understand how insect populations look today.”

Research efforts may be ramping up in the mainland U.S., however, after scientists saw the work coming out of Germany and Puerto Rico.

“I know of groups that are starting to make plans for those kinds of [abundance] studies,” says says Michelle Trautwein, an expert on flies and assistant curator of entomology with the California Academy of Sciences.

So it’s likely that Tyson Wepprich’s work in Ohio is just one of hopefully many studies that will hit science journals in the next few years, meaning we may soon gain a much better sense of the scale of North American insect declines.

“From what I have seen from the Ohio monitoring, even common butterfly species are having trouble adapting to the many potential contributors to the changing environment,” Wepprich says.

While Wepprich only tracked butterflies, his work could complement research that looks at other insect families, or as was done in Germany and Puerto Rico, insect total biomass.

One disturbing new development: the insect declines now being detected in Europe and North America may even extend as far north as the Arctic tundra. Research published in 2017 in Ecography assessed a field site in super-remote Zackenberg, Greenland, and found “strong declines of insects of certain fly families and species,” according to Toke Høye, a co-author and researcher at Denmark’s Aarhus University. One discovery: flies in the Muscidae family dropped by 80 percent in just 20 years.

However, says Høye, those declines haven’t been detected across the board so far; Arctic research has shown declines in waste-eating insects but possible rises in herbivorous ones in Greenland.

He notes that the Arctic declines can only likely be explained by climate change, given that the research station in Zackenberg is too far from any human habitation to be impacted by human-caused habitat destruction or pesticide drift.

Clear-cut forest near Eugene, Oregon. The destruction of forests and other habitats, often due to the intensification of agriculture, has likely been hitting insects hard in the EU and North America, but more data is urgently needed. Image by Calibas via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Drivers of change

To the south, in both Europe and North America, most researchers say the likely primary drivers of most insect population declines so far are habitat loss and degradation, and pesticide use — not climate change.

“Climate change is so far very low on the list of causes,” says Ssymank, referring to European insects.

He notes that insects inhabiting high-altitude areas threatened by global warming (think the Alps) could be being heavily impacted, though that research is yet to be done.

Bradford Lister, who led the Puerto Rico insect abundance study and found climate change to be the primary driver of declines there, disagrees. He says researchers in temperate regions have “totally missed” looking at, and seeing, the impact of climate change on insect abundance.

“I think we have to start utilizing statistical techniques that will allow us to assess the impact of heat on temperate insects,” he says, adding, “We’ve been somewhat remiss in not fully examining the impacts of climate warming.”

In the end, the plunge in insect populations may be due to, and sustained by, a variety of causes, which may differ across regions — though the human fingerprint is assuredly always there.

“Unfortunately I suspect it is more a death by a million cuts that is leading to these dramatic losses,” Moreau concludes.

What we know, and don’t know

Preliminary research in Europe and, to a lesser extent, in North America points to a decline in the abundance of numerous insect species, seemingly across families and habitats. And what we know from Europe is that overall abundance, at least in countries like Germany and the Netherlands, has plunged precipitously in just a few decades — even in nature reserves.

“I think this [serious loss] fits into all the other alarm bells that have been ringing for us and society lately,” Trautwein says. “The potential drivers of [the insect decline] are things that are causing major issues for society and for ecosystems more generally: climate change, habitat destruction, pesticide usage … This is all added evidence that we need to start taking this [mass extinction crisis] seriously.”

Indeed, because everything in the web of life is connected, and because the slashing of one thread leads to the weakening of the whole, crashing insect abundance is almost certainly linked to other ecological degradations occurring on our planet.

“All of a sudden you start looking at nature in a different way because the things that have been changing could very well be changing as a result of this insect decline,” says de Kroon.

For example, insect decline may also explain losses among insect-eating birds, lizards and amphibians.

In the end, we are left with far more questions than answers. For example, how are insects faring on the rest of the planet, where research dollars are spread much more thinly, especially in the tropics of Africa, Asia and Latin America? It’s here that insect diversity stands unparalleled, with most species still unknown to science. But, to date, we have only a single major tropical study on just one protected area on a solitary island in the Caribbean, though we may soon have more.

“Things are in much, much more dire straits than I ever thought. I think the time has come to start using stronger terms,” concludes Lister. “When I saw [the headline] ‘Insect Apocalypse is Here’ [in the New York Times]… I thought, ‘Oh, my God, this isn’t good.’ You know how scientists don’t want to oversell or [use] hyperbole? But now, yes, that’s a good term — a catastrophic collapse is what I’ve been saying lately.”

This is part two of a four-part exclusive series by Mongabay senior contributor Jeremy Hance. Read Part I, “A global look at a deepening crisis” here.  

Mongabay articles are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To republish this report, see here.

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Sources

Koltz, A. M., Schmidt, N. M., & Høye, T. T. (2018). Differential arthropod responses to warming are altering the structure of Arctic communities. Royal Society Open Science, 5(4), 171503. doi:10.1098/rsos.171503

Loboda, S., Savage, J., Buddle, C. M., Schmidt, N. M., & Høye, T. T. (2017). Declining diversity and abundance of High Arctic fly assemblages over two decades of rapid climate warming. Ecography,41(2), 265-277. doi:10.1111/ecog.02747

Bowden, J. J., Hansen, O. L., Olsen, K., Schmidt, N. M., & Høye, T. T. (2018). Drivers of inter-annual variation and long-term change in High-Arctic spider species abundances. Polar Biology,41(8), 1635-1649. doi:10.1007/s00300-018-2351-0

Høye, T. T., Post, E., Schmidt, N. M., Trøjelsgaard, K., & Forchhammer, M. C. (2013). Shorter flowering seasons and declining abundance of flower visitors in a warmer Arctic. Nature Climate Change, 3(8), 759-763. doi:10.1038/nclimate1909

Ollerton, J., Winfree, R., & Tarrant, S. (2011). How many flowering plants are pollinated by animals? Oikos, 120(3), 321-326. doi:10.1111/j.1600-0706.2010.18644.x

Bar-On, Y. M., Phillips, R., & Milo, R. (2018). The biomass distribution on Earth. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(25), 6506-6511. doi:10.1073/pnas.1711842115

Komonen, A., Halme, P., & Kotiaho, J. S. (2019). Alarmist by bad design: Strongly popularized unsubstantiated claims undermine credibility of conservation science. Rethinking Ecology, 4, 17-19. doi:10.3897/rethinkingecology.4.34440

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Cardoso, P., Branco, V. V., Chichorro, F., Fukushima, C. S., & Macías-Hernández, N. (2019). Can we really predict a catastrophic worldwide decline of entomofauna and its drivers? Global Ecology and Conservation, 20. doi:10.1016/j.gecco.2019.e00621

The deal that Trump struck with Mexico late last week in order to prevent the imposition of 5-25% tariffs on all of its exports to the US marketplace simultaneously advances his vision of “Fortress America” and softens the blow of China’s counter-sanctions by making Mexico his country’s “Lead From Behind” security partner in Central America’s “Northern Triangle” and getting it to agree to the large-scale purchase of agricultural products that the People’s Republic recently tariffed.

Trump came out on top in last week’s high-stakes tariff game with Mexico after clinching a deal with it just days prior to his promised imposition of 5% tariffs on all of its exports to the US marketplace, which would compound every month until November when they’d reach a 25% ceiling. The Mexican economy is completely dependent on the American one, especially after NAFTA enabled third parties to invest in the country as a backdoor to exporting their goods tariff-free to the US. There was no way that it could have survived the crushing effect of up to 25% tariffs, which would have inevitably led to the rapid large-scale exodus of untold billions of dollars from its economy as foreign investors rerouted their supply chains in response, hence why Mexico felt compelled to give in to Trump’s border security demands by “taking unprecedented steps to increase enforcement to curb irregular migration” along the Guatemalan border from Central America’s unstable “Northern Triangle”.

The official State Department statement also said that both parties “welcome the Comprehensive Development Plan launched by the Government of Mexico in concert with the Governments of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras” to “promote prosperity, good governance and security in Central America”. This aspect of the agreement can be understood as the US delegating Mexico as its “Lead From Behind” security partner for managing the three primary Central American states from which the majority of illegal immigrants have been arriving in recent years. In exchange for acting as the US’ border security vanguard by directly curtailing illegal immigration from the southern isthmus, as well as agreeing to house US asylum seekers on its territory until their cases have been adjudicated, the Mexican economy will be spared the “nuclear bomb” of Trump’s 5-25% tariffs on all its northern-destined exports. Put another way, Trump was able to masterfully leverage the US’ economic influence over Mexico in order to achieve a tangible security outcome.

In addition, Trump also tweeted that “Mexico has agreed to immediately begin buying large quantities of agricultural product from our great patriot farmers”, which will help one of his key constituencies ahead of next year’s heated 2020 elections after China’s counter-sanctions curtailed their exports to the world’s largest marketplace as a retaliatory escalation in the ongoing “trade war“. Taken together, it becomes evident that Trump’s deal with Mexico advances his “Fortress America” vision of restoring the US’ “sphere of influence” over the Western Hemisphere by having his southern neighbor take the lead in dealing with the unconventional threat of “Weapons of Mass Migration” under pane of crippling economic punishment, as well as representing a clever solution for softening the political-economic blow from China’s counter-sanctions against American farmers. In essence, Trump is pursuing US-led hemispheric autarky by relying on Mexico’s massive market (and possibly soon, the rest of Latin America’s and especially Brazil’s) to compensate for the loss of China’s.

This wouldn’t have been possible had it not been for the success of the Obama-era “Operation Condor 2.0” series of rolling regime changes across the region that pushed back the so-called “Pink Tide” and restored the US’ supremacy over the hemisphere, which in turn enabled Trump to weaponize access to the US consumer market through sanctions threats for political-economic purposes, a tactic that’s already become the hallmark of his presidency after being rigorously applied against the multipolar Great Powers of Russia, China, and Iran. The quickness with which Mexico capitulated to Trump’s border security demands speaks to the effectiveness of these interconnected efforts, as well as the systemic vulnerability of the rest of the hemisphere’s comparatively weaker southern states vis-a-vis their dependence on exports to the US, strongly suggesting that the Mexican precedent can simply be repackaged and reapplied as needed on a case-by-case basis as Trump puts the finishing touches on “Fortress America” in preparation for his drawn-out “trade war” with China.

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Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Introductory Note on Somalia. Its Relevance to Haiti

One year of the war between Somalia and Ethiopia (1977-78) was enough to destroy an entire country and spread instability across the region.

After the 1991 coup that toppled general Mohamed Siad Barre from power,  conflict was inevitable. A long overdue civil war broke out, ignited by Ethiopia. The government financed many small groups of armed thugs to destabilize the populace, and Somalia abruptly stopped being a state, let alone a government. Somalia no longer fit the United Nations’ definition of a “Group of people which have acquired international recognition as an independent country and which have a population, a common language and a defined a distinct territory”.  In effect, the government and state of Somalia had ceased to exist. Therefore, it became impossible for the specialists of international law to approve Somalia as a state.

Somalia was run by 5 gangs that divided the country between warlords. The concept of a central government was replaced by a cadre of armed thugs. Every 25 miles, there was a warlord taking actions in the sole interest of his gang, which integrated into a bigger group.

The consequences didn’t take long to explode in the face of the world. In 1992, after the report of 300,000 deaths, the United Nations, supported by the US. government, had to take action to stop the madness. They created the “United Nations Operation in Somalia; UNOSOM I. The goal of this mission was to facilitate humanitarian aid and to make sure a cease-fire would endure.

Before that, the war-lords diverted  humanitarian aid, shelled it out to their partisans, and traded with neighboring countries for guns and ammunition. They used the aid to maintain a solid relationship between the local population and their cause. This created a favorable precondition for the warlords in the field when they declared UN soldiers “Persona Non-Grata” under heavy fire in Mogadishu.

The civil war killed more than 500,000 Somalians, more than 2 million refugees, 2 U.S. black-hawk helicopters went down, and the United States lost 18 soldiers.  Pakistan and India lost soldiers as well.

In 2018, Somalia remains on the brink.  Mogadishu, the capital, is still under heavy fire. On October 14th, 2018, “A bomb-laden truck in central Mogadishu killed at least 358 people.” Unfortunately, the Somali people are still living in distress and the United Nations is failing to bring peace and stability to the 15 million men, women, and children whose fate is tied to Somalia. Haiti, is also moving quickly into chaos to become the next Somalia of America. No one is taking notice.

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“Somalisation”, The Destruction of Haiti

Whether you like or hate Jean Bertrand Aristide, he spared Haiti from the process of ‘somalisation’ that destroyed so many countries in Africa: Liberia, Chad, Libya, and Sudan, by agreeing to withdraw himself from power on February 29th, 2004. When Guy Philippe, former chief of police, [supported by the CIA] led an armed rebellion to overthrow him from power in 2003, it marked the beginning of the destruction of Haiti.

In the Wake of the 2010 Earthquake

Immediately after the earthquake that claimed more than 300,000  lives in 2010, another opportunity for ‘somalization’  presented itself. The country was in total disarray, the capital was 40 % destroyed, and more than 1 million people were displaced or lived under tents in very difficult conditions. The international community, specifically the United Nations and the United States, pushed the government toward organizing elections. In that chaotic situation, the least qualified presidential candidate, Michel Martelly, was handpicked and parachuted to power by the Clinton’s, Hillary and Bill.

It was well known that putting an inexperienced man such as Martelly in power would create high tensions. Today, here is the reality: a country is on the verge of a breakdown, both social and economic. Civil war is upon us.

Port-Au-Prince, the capital of Haiti, is similar to Mogadishu in 1991. Here is the configuration of the new “Wild Wild West,’’ in the heart of the Americas. The south side of the capital is run by 3 great warlords: Bougoy in “Gran Ravine,’’ “Baz Pilat” in the middle, and Arnel in the northwest of the city.

The north is under control of “Tijunior,’’ “Ti ougan,’’ “Barbecue” (a former cop), and  southwest by a young man called “Tije”.

A few weeks ago, one of the warlords, Arnel,  made an audacious move by creating another branch of his criminal organization in the department of “Artibonite,” in the north of the country. The plan is to expand his grip to a larger territory outside of the capital. At the beginning of the month the national police force tried to apprehend him, and that was a catastrophe. Arnel and his armed men kicked PNH out of the area, got inside of the headquarters of the police, vandalized it, stole everything then could, burned police cars, and demolished a local store for DIGICEL, the largest phone company in Haiti. Since then, an area that is inhabited by 155,272 people is under control of the warlord Arnel.

The parallel is obvious. The gangs are better equipped than the national police forces. They have the best weapons (M-16, Galil, Kalashnikov, T-65), many trucks and cars, and some of them are new. It’s not a secret to anybody that the government is providing guns, ammunition, and money to those armed groups. They openly admitted it. There is a radio station called “Radio Mega,’’ and Luco Desir, a very popular anchor who from time to time interviewed Arnel Joseph. He admitted that he got support from some officials of the government. On April 24th, a former prosecutor in the capital, Danton Leger, declared that the president of Haiti, Mr. Jovenel Moise, sent $100,000 to Arnel via an active senator, Gracia Delva.

The chairman of the commission of justice and security in the Senate, the senator Jean Renel Senatus, provided information to the press on May 23rd, 2019, that after an investigation by his commission, they found the phone number of senator Gracia Delva listed in Arnel’s Phone. And they spoke frequently, 24 times from February 7th to 17th. Of course, the senator denied it.

The capital of Haiti, Port-au-Prince is devoid of people after 6 at night. The population is being held hostage in their own homes. If there is an emergency in the middle of the night, no one will take the chance to drive to the hospital because the gangs take over each night.

An independent and well respected Haitian journalist from “Nouvelliste,’’ Robenson Geffrard, tweeted:

“the armed gang led by the warlord Arnel Joseph, wanted by the police, and the gang of “Savien,’’ are raping people. They intercepted a bus filled with missionaries at “L’estere” (an area in the department of “Artibonite”), and they raped all the women found in the bus.’’

On November 13th, 2018, a massacre took place in a slum area called “Lasaline.’’ RNDDH, a human rights organization, published an investigative report  which  said 70 people were killed, and many houses burned down. Videos were posted on social media showing animals eating  the bodies of people in “Lasaline”. The United Nations was forced to investigate the matter and corroborated the results of the human right organizations. The armed groups used guns and machetes to attack people and burned down their houses. Some of the attackers were dressed in national police uniforms.

Some people believe that gangs are a tool used by the government to intimidate and repress people. Specifically, the armed men create a situation of permanent tension in the main shantytowns of the country by constantly firing guns into the air. Sometimes, they kill inhabitants just to dissuade them from taking part in the electoral process. Those favoring the government are provided free transportation to the polls.

The population of Haiti is living in horrendous social and economic conditions. With less than $2 a day, no electricity, no clean water, no jobs, no health system; they are living with practically nothing. The corrupt government is making it worse for the people when they decide to use warlords to intimidate and kill them. Far away from the international press, the population is silently ingesting their misery. Because Haiti is not Venezuela, the American administration is currently supporting the process of “Somalization” of Haiti by vowing their support to a corrupt government that is terrorizing its own population. The chaos continues. The process of Somalization of Haiti is in rapid development.

On May 25th 2019, a group of armed men attacked a group of people in the streets of the capital around 8 at night. 8 people were reported killed and many injured. Yvenson Destine, journalist of radio zenith, went in the area the next day morning to acquire information about the carnage. He was assaulted by the same group of bandits, one person was killed, and the journalist was in hiding for many hours until police came. Here is the volatile reality of Haiti, where armed groups have control some parts of the capital.

June 9^th 2019, more than 1 million people were on the street asking peacefully “Kote Kob Petwokaribe a” (where is the Petrocaribe money). Police forces step in killing 7 people and injuring 147, 70 were arrested. The chaos is continuing!

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US Secretary for State Mike Pompeo has come under fire after a recording emerged of him saying he’d intervene to stop Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn becoming Prime Minister. In the recording first reported by the Washington Post, Pompeo suggests he won’t wait for Corbyn to be elected, rather he’ll attempt to stop it from being possible.

The off the record meeting was from when The Secretary for State met Jewish leaders to discuss Donald Trump’s proposed Peace Deal between Palestine and Israel.

Apart from appearing un-optimistic about the Peace Deal, he found time to comment on UK politics. When asked by an attendee;

if Corbyn “is elected, would you be willing to work with us to take on actions if life becomes very difficult for Jews in the U.K.?”

Pompeo gives a very clear response. Considering the allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential elections, the irony here is inescapable. The top US diplomat told those in attendance;

“It could be that Mr. Corbyn manages to run the gantlet and get elected. It’s possible. You should know, we won’t wait for him to do those things to begin to push back. We will do our level best,

“It’s too risky and too important and too hard once it’s already happened.”

This response received a voracious round of applause from those in the meeting.

These remarks raise serious questions about US interference in UK Politics. It has been alleged by many, that Russia played a part in the United Kingdom’s decision to leave the European Union (EU). Now a top US official wants to influence a General Election or perhaps have Corbyn removed as Labour Party leader.

Corbyn’s Path to Power

For the Jeremy Corbyn to become Prime Minister, he would need his party to gain the most seats in Parliament and be able to hold a majority following a General Election.

The next election in the UK isn’t due until 2022. However, an early election can be called if the government of the time loses a “vote of no confidence” or, MPs vote by two-thirds to dissolve parliament early.

Given that the Conservative Party are electing a new leader who will become the next Prime Minister, it is possible that either of these scenarios could occur.

UK politics is however chaotic at the moment. Nigel Farage’s newly formed Brexit Party did well in the recent European Elections. The two main parties, Labour and the Conservatives are also both under fire for the Brexit stances. Given all that is going on, no party is guaranteed a majority raising the possibility of a Coalition Government.

Interference Irony

Donald Trump’s entire presidency has been overshadowed by allegations that Russia colluded with his campaign to help him win in 2016. The Mueller Report did find that there was no evidence of Russian collusion, with some caveats.

For Mike Pompeo to come out saying he’d attempt to block Jeremy Corbyn becoming Prime Minister is just rank hypocrisy.

A Labour spokesmen hit out at the revelation by saying;

“President Trump and his officials’ attempts to decide who will be Britain’s next prime minister are an entirely unacceptable interference in the UK’s democracy.”

The remarks about President Trump relate to comments he made during his State Visit to the United Kingdom last week. Mr Trump suggested that Nigel Farage should be involved in Brexit negotiations and, he endorsed Boris Johnson to become the next Prime Minister following Theresa May’s resignation telling the Sun Newspaper;

“I think Boris would do a very good job. I think he would be excellent,”

Antisemitism Claims

Mainstream Jewish organisations in the UK have be vocal in their opposition of Jeremy Corbyn. Since his election as Labour Leader in 2015, he has been dogged by attacks in the media accusing him and Labour of antisemitism.

Despite these attacks, his popularity has grown and Labour is now the largest political party by membership in Western Europe. In 2017 against all predictions Corbyn led Labour to get an increased vote share and also lost the Conservatives their majority in Parliament. This is what has led to deadlock in parliament as the Conservatives don’t have a majority to pass legislation.

MPs in his own party have called Corbyn himself an antisemite. Dame Margaret Hodge famously screamed it in his face in the corridors of the House of Commons in London. She was initially placed under investigation for this but it was later dropped as Mr Corbyn didn’t want to take action.

Under his leadership he has changed the process for dealing with claims of antisemitism. A body independent of the party leadership look into any claims and take action were appropriate. One of the main issues that seems to pass by most media commentators, is the fact that Labour can only take action against it’s members. Many of the complaints they receive turn out to involve non-party members.

Corbyn has spoken out on antisemitism and all forms of racism by stating they have no place in society. This is not enough for most of his critics. Only his removal for the top job will satisfy those unhappy with his leadership.

Many on the left of UK politics believe that the hostility towards Jeremy Corbyn stems from his support of Palestine. He has been clear that should he be elected, the UK will officially recognise Palestine as a country.

Mr Corbyn has frequently spoken out against the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians since he became a Member of Parliament in 1983. He has also defended Jewish groups throughout his time in parliament too.

There is a strong Lobby for Israel in UK politics. This is no secret and has played against Corbyn on many occasions. However, now the US Israeli lobby is getting involved, this ramps things up significantly. The United States has always been much closer to Israel and any threat to the status quo will be seen and treated as a threat.

Mike Pompeo has made this clear in his comments.

What Next for UK Politics

Over the next few months the UK political scene is going to change significantly. A new Prime Minister will take office seeing the Cabinet change in composition.

The UK is due to leave the European Union at the end of October, with or without a deal. This could see the economy take a hit bringing more uncertainty.

A General Election is a real possibility what with Parliament being in deadlock over Brexit. Any interference from US Politicians is not taken well in the UK. When then US President Barrack Obama commented that the UK would be at “the back of the queue” should they vote to leave the EU, he faced criticism from all sides.

Should Pompeo or any other politician attempt to sway people of influence the Labour Party I would expect a similar response. Whilst no fans of each other, UK political parties don’t like outside interference.

Pompeo’s remarks also may come back to haunt him should Jeremy Corbyn become Prime Minister. The US and UK share a lot on defence and intelligence so a strained relationship from the start may put pressure on this.

With President Trump’s long awaited Peace Deal for Israel and Palestine due to be announced soon, the US don’t want a spanner being thrown in the works by Jeremy Corbyn.

With the Trump administration, anything is possible.

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Alex Tiffin is a freelance journalist covering politics with a specific interest in welfare, disability & world events. I present facts so you can make informed decisions.

Featured image is from Gage Skidmore — CC BY-SA 2.0

Signs that European customers are “abandoning” UK firms are starting to show after British manufacturing recorded the steepest downturn in almost three years.

Following an early Brexit stockpiling boom at the start of the year May figures dipped significantly for UK manufacturers with new orders drying up.

Make UK – formerly known as the EEF – said the downturn shows investment plans have been “paralysed” by Brexit uncertainty in the second quarter of the year, warning that a ‘no deal’ would equate to “economic lunacy”.

The warnings have been sounded as the IHS Markit/CIPS UK Manufacturing Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) fell to 49.4 from 53.1 in April, its lowest level since July 2016 and worse than all forecasts in a Reuters poll of economists that had pointed to a fall to 52.0.

Make UK’s chief executive, Stephen Phipson, warned elements of the manufacturing industry would be pushed over the edge if the uncertainty continued.

He said:

“Earlier this year there was clear evidence that industry was on steroids as companies stockpiled.

“Underneath, however, there is now growing evidence of European companies abandoning UK supply chains, whilst Asian customers baulk at the unknown of what may exist as the UK leaves trade agreements which operate under EU rules.

“With this picture it would be the height of economic lunacy to take the UK out of the EU with no deal in place. The race to the bottom in the interests of party ideology has to stop otherwise there will be a heavy price to pay.”

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Jack Peat is a business and economics journalist and the founder of The London Economic (TLE).He has contributed articles to The Sunday Telegraph, BBC News and writes for The Big Issue on a weekly basis.Jack read History at the University of Wales, Bangor and has a Masters in Journalism from the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

Featured image is from The London Economic

According to editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks Kristinn Hrafnsson: “[The Trump administration]  is so desperate to build its case against WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange that it is using a diagnosed sociopath, a convicted conman and sex criminal, who was exposed by the highest levels of the Icelandic government as an FBI informant and who was involved in an entrapment operation in 2011 against Julian Assange.”

Trump’s Justice Department is “preparing to file (an) additional indictment against Assange” on top of current phony charges, wanting him punished for the “crime” of truth-telling journalism the way it should be.

Despite guilty of no crimes, he currently faces 18 spurious charges, the Trump regime wanting him imprisoned longterm.

Arresting and imprisoning him in the UK was all about holding him for extradition to the US — his mistreatment an assault on fundamental speech, media and academic freedoms, Britain and hardliners in Washington want eliminated.

The Trump regime got Chelsea Manning indefinitely detained for refusing to help build a stronger case against Assange.

According to WikiLeaks, its hardliners intend using convicted felon/FBI informant Sigurdur Thordarson as a witness against him.

He’s already considered guilty by accusation multiple times over, conviction on multiple counts certain if subjected to US kangaroo court injustice — the way Chelsea Manning and other courageous whistleblowers were framed.

According to Dutch public broadcaster NOS, FBI agent Megan Brown in charge of Assange’s crucifixion went to Reykjavik, Iceland in early May with Eastern District of Virginia prosecutor Kellen Dwyer.

Aided by Icelandic police, they interrogated Thordarson. On May 27, he was flown to Washington for further interrogation, remaining until June 1.

According to WikiLeaks, he agreed to help build a case against Assange. He’s now free after earlier imprisonment on charges of embezzlement, fraud, and sex crimes against nine minors.

He “stole tens of thousands of dollars from WikiLeaks, and impersonated Julian Assange in order to carry out the embezzlement,” Hrafnsson explained, adding:

“As part of (his) criminal prosecution…in Iceland, he was examined by a forensic psychiatrist who diagnosed him as a sociopath.”

Because he lacks credibility as a convicted felon for his grand theft against WikiLeaks, impersonating Assange, along with involvement an FBI plot to entrap him, his identity and fellow agency informant Hector Monsegut will be concealed during UK extradition proceedings against Assange to begin in June 14.

Reportedly in 2011, eight or nine FBI agents and Eastern District of Virginia prosecutors were expelled by Icelandic authorities for unacceptable activities in the country against Assange.

Yet its authorities cooperated with the Trump regime to help frame him for the “crime” of journalism.

According to Sydney Morning Herald reporter Ryan Gallagher,

“Thordarson gave the FBI a large amount of data on WikiLeaks, including private chat message logs, photographs, and contact details of volunteers, activists, and journalists affiliated with the organization.”

Reportedly one or more other WikiLeaks staffers may be charged by Trump’s Justice Department. According to a US Attorney’s Office letter to former WikiLeaks spokesman Daniel Domscheit-Berg, he was offered immunity from prosecution in return for fully cooperating with the DOJ, the offer later withdrawn.

In response to 18 current charges against Assange, Law Professor Jack Goldsmith said the work of Assange and WikiLeaks is no different from other media.

Attorney Jacques Semmelman, specializing in extradition cases, said the following about Assange’s indictment and request for UK authorities to hand him over to the US for prosecution:

“It is a classic political offense. I have a difficult time seeing a British court departing so significantly from legal tradition and saying in this case they will make an exception,” adding:

“The political offense exception as it has existed for probably 150 years has consistently maintained that for espionage charges, they are not extraditable. That’s just a classic principle of international extradition law.”

Assange’s health is another issue. UN special rapporteur on torture Nils Melzer visited him at London’s high-security Belmarsh prison. Two medical experts in the effects of torture and other forms of abuse accompanied him.

After a thorough physical and psychological examination, they concluded that years of involuntary confinement in Ecuador’s London embassy, compounded by imprisonment at Belmarsh, took an enormous toll on his health.

Melzer stressed that he could die in prison, adding:

“This is not prosecution. This is persecution and it has to stop here and it has to stop now.”

Trump regime hardliners want him for a politicized show trial, guilt automatic before beginning, a warning to other investigative journalists that the same fate awaits them if they reveal information about US high crimes and other wrongdoing it wants suppressed.

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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Featured image is from Massoud Nayeri

The ongoing events in Sudan are a perfect example of the uncontrollable chaos that can be unleashed in society following a Color Revolution, with it now becoming almost impossible to predict how the latest crisis will be resolved, if ever.

Disturbing Developments

“Revolutions devour their own children”, as the saying goes, and nowhere is that more evident than in contemporary Sudan in the two months following the military coup against former President Bashir.

The armed forces overthrew the long-serving leader after he reportedly intended to use violence against the protesters that were participating in an ever-intensifying Color Revolution, yet now those very same forces did what they supposedly prevented Bashir from doing and killed dozens of people camped out in the capital.

This led to the country’s suspension from the African Union and an urgent diplomatic intervention by Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy to mediate the crisis, yet the authorities soon thereafter arrested one of the protest organizers and also the head of the “Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North” armed opposition group that met with him and therefore destroyed domestic and international trust in the Transitional Military Council (TMC). At this point, the entire situation is unpredictable as a result of the uncontrollably chaotic processes unleashed in society following the onset of the country’s Color Revolution earlier this year, and it’s anyone’s guess what happens next.

International Interests

Sudan’s stability is integral to the interests of several countries, some of which are interestingly rivals with one another. The GCC and its Egyptian ally are competing with Turkey for influence in the country, which is essentially an extension of the ongoing “GCC Cold War” between Qatar and the rest of its notional partners in the bloc over Doha’s patronage of the Ankara-allied Muslim Brotherhood that the remaining members of the organization and Cairo regard as terrorists. Bashir had previously allowed Turkey to rebuild the historic port of Suakin, which Egypt and the GCC consider to be part of a secret plot to set up a Turkish naval base in the Red Sea and has fueled speculation that they might have backed the early stages of the Color Revolution as part of a campaign of pressure to get him to reconsider this deal. Russia and China are also Sudan’s close partners, too, with the former seeing it as its point of entry into the rest of the continent and one of the three states pivotally comprising its “African Trilateral” while the latter needs the country for its envisaged bi-coastal “Sahelian-Saharan Silk Road“.

American Aims

The US is actually the only country that could theoretically gain from Sudan’s ongoing instability, which Bashir predicted a year and a half ago during his visit to Russia when he warned that America wants to divide his state into five parts. Just as the US sought to revise the Sykes-Picot status quo in the Mideast through its geopolitical re-engineering schemes brought about by the outcome of the theater-wide Color Revolutions popularly known as the “Arab Spring”, so too might it be seeking to do the same in Africa through its Syrian-like weaponization of chaos theory after this latest stage of what the author previously described as the “African Spring“. To put it simply, American strategists might have keenly predicted the broad course of events that would follow the onset of the Color Revolution in Sudan, with their country only having to indirectly and minimally intervene as needed in order to guide them in the direction of its grand strategic interests, which in this case might be the “Balkanization” of Sudan into five separate states, an outcome that goes against the interests of each of the aforementioned countries except the US.

A Return To Militancy?

The TMC seems aware of this plot and that might be why it arrested the SPLM-N’s leader, but the way in which it did so right after he met with PM Abiy makes it seem like he was set up and could possibly provoke the organization into resuming its militancy against the state before or after the unilateral three-month ceasefire that it declared expires in mid-July. That group and other armed ones probably saw an opportunity in Bashir’s overthrow to decentralize Sudan along the lines of a Bosnian-like “Identity Federation“, which is just a step away from the outright separatism that the US is speculatively supporting. With international pressure building and a return to militancy possibly being imminent, the TMC might have its hands full with a plethora of problems on top of the most pressing one of the ongoing Color Revolution that never went away after the coup. About that, the challenge with Color Revolutions is that they open up a Pandora’s Box of problems that are intended to be almost impossible for the state to properly deal with, thus leading to its systemic weakening and the creation of a self-sustaining cycle of unrest.

Color Revolution Pawns

The protesters are so concerned with ensuring an irreversible transition from military to civilian rule that they seem oblivious to the fact that their actions are putting the country’s existence in jeopardy, therefore making them function as indirect (if mostly unwitting) pawns of American foreign policy. That’s not to take away from their legitimate grievances, but just to point out how Color Revolutions masterfully exploit chaotic processes in pursuit of a third party’s grand strategic ends, even if the actual participants are largely unaware of it. Therein lays another problem because the government’s response to the worsening Color Revolution crisis will always be imperfect, with passivity being interpreted as weakness and thus inspiring more anti-state activity while too heavy-handed of an approach risks provoking armed militancy. The ideal solution would be to preempt the Color Revolution in the first place through a combination of proactive socio-economic development projects and solid intelligence efforts, though that ship has already proverbially sailed in Sudan’s case and there’s no going back to the pre-crisis status quo.

Concluding Thoughts

Sudan is in an ever-worsening state of crisis after the recent developments of the past week when the armed forces killed dozens of Color Revolutionaries, got the country suspended from the African Union in response, and arrested two key opposition figures shortly after PM Abiy’s mediation meeting with them. The scenario of state fragmentation is worryingly being furthered after these latest events, yet all the participants — the state, the anti-state forces (both peaceful and otherwise), and Sudan’s international partners — seem powerless to avert it given the uncontrollably chaotic processes that have already been unleashed in the country since the onset of the Color Revolution, which it should be acknowledged was made possible in the first place by the preexisting systemic shortcomings that were simply exacerbated by the US’ sanctions regime. There’s no telling what comes next, but the prognosis is far from positive and it seems likely that the worst-case scenario might become more probable than ever before, though there’s still a chance — however unlikely — that it can still be averted if free and fair elections are held as soon as possible but even that might not stop what could be an irreversible process by this point.

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This article was originally published on Eurasia Future.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

The public sector “salary restraint” legislation expected by public sector union leaders was formally introduced on June 5th (Protecting a Sustainable Public Sector for Future Generations Act, 2019). I will get to the criticism in a moment. First, I have to acknowledge the Orwellian chutzpah of this government: without a climate change plan, it cheekily appropriates the language of “sustainability” and concern for “future generations.” They could have topped themselves by tipping their hat to the indigenous traditions they are also ignoring by adding “seven” in front of “generations.” Perhaps the next spending restraint bill can be more inclusive.

Titles aside, the bill is not about a sustainable anything, but first and foremost a shot across the bow of public sector unions (and especially the teachers’ unions, who will be in bargaining soon). The public service has been a target for governments of all denominations (remember Rae Days, everyone)? We can be certain that, if – as I hope – we are able to mobilize a staunch defence of collective bargaining rights, the government will try to drive a wedge between public sector “fat cats” and those hard working Ontarians in the private sector for whom this “government of the people” is working so hard.

Problem is: already, 75% of “the people” think that the government is on the wrong course. We have seen an impressive mobilization of the parents of autistic children against the government’s plans to change the funding support model for their children. There has been a sizeable demonstration in support of public healthcare in response to the serious threats of privatization lurking in the government’s healthcare bill. Now, they are openly challenging 1 million broader public sector workers to put up or shut up.

We Need to Put ’em Up

The issue here is not salary restraint. The bill caps total salary increases for workers and management at 1% per year for the three years following the signing of the next collective agreement. (It will not apply retroactively, but it will apply to agreements signed at any point in the future. Thus, if your agreement expires in two years time, it cannot include salary increases in excess of 1% per year for the next three years). No one in the broader public sector has achieved salary growth much in excess of this figure for over a decade. (An analysis of salary growth over the period 2013-2017 by the Ontario Confederation of Faculty Associations shows that nominal salaries have increased from a low of an average of .5% in 2013 to a high of 1.9% in 2017). I say ‘nominal’ because, once we factor in inflation, real salaries have shrunk. If inflation is roughly 2%, then a rate of “growth” less than 2% is actually a reduction of real wages.

“Well, so what,” a hard working citizen might respond. “A lot of you are fat cats, and your wages are not being cut, they are just being capped. Deal with it. If I have to suffer, so should you.”

Ok, on one level this response is fair enough, if it is targeted at the highest paid members of the broader public service (which would include tenured university faculty). However, in response, it is necessary to, first, remind everyone that the broader public service is not all tenured professors and deputy ministers. The majority of workers in the public sector are not raking it in, and they face the same rising costs and declining public services as everyone else.

Second, and more importantly, the threat this bill poses is as much or more political as it is economic. No one will die of starvation if their salaries are capped for three years. However, the collective power of workers to govern our work conditions (already nearly dead after forty years of neoliberal attacks on unions) will take another fateful step toward the grave unless we can turn this attack into fuel for a serious mobilization. Our goal has to be, in the short term, to block the passage of this bill. That short term goal has to be connected to a longer term strategy to protect public services as an actually existing alternative to priced commodities in consumer markets, adequately fund them, and ensure that Ford is back making decals in three years time (if not before).

It is true that collective bargaining is not workers’ control. Even before this bill, legal power is still overwhelmingly in the employer’s hands. Nevertheless, the principle is a step in the right direction. The principle that underlies collective bargaining is that work life should not be determined by market forces but by workers’ collective interests in safe, secure, meaningful, and socially valuable work.

As the OCUFA analysis shows, public sector workers do not have a vendetta against the public we serve. We have not bargained so as to fiscally destroy universities, hospitals, or government agencies. Still, we are not volunteers, we need to be paid, and we have a democratic right, (which, like all democratic rights, is the fruit of decades of struggle from below, not a gift from above), to bargain our conditions of work. The Bill claims that the right to collectively bargain is not compromised. But this is legalistic nonsense designed to ward off a Charter challenge (the Supreme Court has consistently affirmed the right to collective bargaining as a protected right under the Charter). The bill gives the Minister the right to void any collective agreement that contains salary increases above 1%. So, we can bargain anything we like, but if the Minister so decides, the agreement can be scrapped. Some right!

Defend Democratic Achievements

Some of us in the broader public sector enjoy something that approximates those conditions of work. We will not improve other workers’ conditions by allowing our historical gains to be undermined. Governments and their business allies know that driving a wedge between different groups of workers (or dividing the problem of work from the problems of democratic citizenship generally) serves to undermine our collective power, and paves the way for across the board attacks on democratic achievements, public services, and the institutional infrastructure we all depend upon for the satisfaction of our natural and social needs.

To be sure, cuts to welfare spending or hospitals are more dire and immediate threats to the satisfaction of the needs of the most vulnerable than capping public sector salaries at 1% for three years. However, politically, we have to resist the urge to divide struggles in this way (although, if it comes to a triage situation where choices have to be made, then, by all means, we have to choose to protect the most vulnerable). Political progress against attacks and for a well-funded infrastructure of robust public services is best made when we find common ground and fight together. Now is the time for those of us with a high degree of job security to put it to work, not to defend our right to make as much money as humanly possible, but to defend democratic achievements and insist upon better opportunities, better public services, and better life-protection for everyone, starting with the most vulnerable.

We do not need more words. We need action. And that has to start with the leadership of the major public sector unions (including university faculty associations) meeting as soon as possible to map out strategy and tactics. The Days of Action against Mike Harris had his Common Sense Revolutionaries on the run, before we let them off the hook. Let’s not make the same mistake twice.

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Contemporary Middle Eastern history is strongly influenced by energy politics. Besides providing revenue for the state’s coffers, oil is also a potent geopolitical tool in the hands of resource-rich countries. Recently, officials from Lebanon, Syria and Iraq have engaged in talks to restart the dysfunctional pipeline that once connected oilfields near Kirkuk in Iraq with the coastal city of Tripoli in Lebanon. Restarting the pipeline could have long-term political, economic, and strategic consequences for the involved states and the wider region.

The original infrastructure was constructed during the 30s of the previous century when two 12-inch pipes transported oil from Kirkuk to Haifa in British mandated Palestine and Tripoli in French-mandated Lebanon. The Tripoli line was supplemented by a 30-inch pipeline in the 50s which could transport approximately 400,000 barrels/day. The Kirkuk-Tripoli pipeline was suspended by Syria during the Iraq-Iran war in an attempt to support Tehran in its struggle against Baghdad.

Paving the way

The current political climate, which has enabled cooperation between Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, is the consequence of one country’s foreign policy. Since the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, Iranian influence has grown considerably across the Middle East. Tehran’s support for proxies in neighboring countries has strongly influenced regional politics and made Saudi Arabia nervous of what it sees as “Persian encroachment”.

The Iranian support for Syria’s President Assad provided a lifeline to the regime during the country’s civil war. Tehran has invested significantly in maintaining the position of its ally in Damascus. In neighboring Iraq, the democratization process installed a Shia-dominated parliament which is supported by powerful paramilitary groups funded and organized by the Quds force, the branch of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard responsible for extraterritorial activities. Despite significant military and political gains, consolidation is required to cement the ties between Iran’s Arab partners, which would also benefit Tehran.

The art of the deal

While Iran’s participation in regional politics was necessary for creating the right environment for cooperation, Russia’s involvement has proven to be crucial. The Kremlin’s decision to participate in the Syrian civil war on the side of Assad’s forces was a pivotal moment in reestablishing control over territories essential for the Kirkuk-Tripoli pipeline to commence operations. Moscow has also established good political relations with both Iraq and Lebanon to become a broker for facilitating an agreement.

The participation of Rosneft was very useful for Moscow’s efforts in the region. The Russian energy giant maintains good relations with the Iraqi government where it operates several oil fields and the Kirkuk-Ceyhan oil pipeline. Recently, Rosneft signed an agreement with the Lebanese government to operate the storage facility in Tripoli for the next twenty years. Therefore, Russian involvement was important for the Arab countries to consider refurbishing the outdated Kirkuk-Tripoli pipeline.

Despite the modest capacity of the pipeline, reestablishing trade could have a long-term impact on regional politics. The new pipeline would be a physical link between the participating countries and will cement the political ties for decades due to interdependency regarding energy security and the economic interest of energy exports.

Uncertainties ahead

Despite the intention to reinvigorate the old Kirkuk-Tripoli pipeline, it remains unclear whether the project will see the light of day. Especially the situation in Syria creates a veil of uncertainty which makes construction and operation a problematic task. Although the Syrian government has reestablished control over Eastern Syria, IS remains a threat to stability with attacks being an almost daily occurrence. It is uncertain whether the depleted and exhausted Syrian army will be able to secure the pipeline while engaging the remaining rebel-held areas in Idlib.

Also, it can be expected that Washington won’t idly sit by while its rivals in Moscow and Tehran entrench themselves even further in the region. Therefore, for now at least, talks of reinvigorating the pipeline will continue behind closed doors until the security situation improves significantly.

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Vanand Meliksetian is an energy and utilities consultant who has worked with several major international energy companies. He has an LL.M. from VU Amsterdam University Law and Politics of International Security where he wrote his thesis on Russian-European energy relations. He specializes in international legal and political developments.

The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 enshrined the principle of outer space being preserved as a common heritage of humankind,¹ yet “lacks any provisions that would regulate the methods of the settlement of eventual disputes, which usually appear in law-making treaties, such as the 1959 Antarctic Treaty”.² Outer space is now an “increasingly congested and contested environment”.³  Delegates at the UN’s First Committee dealing with disarmament and international security determined that “prompt action [is] needed to address the safety and security of the Earth’s orbit, given growing numbers of satellites, the development of sophisticated defence systems and the ever-increasing amount of orbital congestion, which currently [includes] more than 500,000 pieces of debris”.⁴ “[R]adio frequencies and any associated orbits…are limited natural resources thatmust be used rationally, efficiently and economically … so that countries … may have equitable access to those orbits and frequencies.”⁵

“[A]s more countries integrate space into their national military capabilities and rely onspace-based information for national security, there is an increased chance that any interference with satellites could spark or escalate tensions and conflict in space or on Earth. This is made all the more difficult by the challenge of determining the exact cause of a satellite malfunction: whether it was due to a space weather event, impact by space debris, unintentional interference, or deliberate aggression.”⁶

“Some states are developing or have developed a range of [anti-satellite] ASAT capabilities,including ground- and space-based weapons, that could be used to deceive, disrupt, deny, degrade, or destroy elements of space systems. Developing and testing ASAT capabilities would likely undermine political and strategic stability, especially without clarity of intent. Further, testing or using debris-generating weapons could contaminate the orbital environment for decades to centuries, significantly affecting all space actors and severely undermining the long-term sustainability of space.”⁶

“[T]he weaponization of outer space for any purpose—whether offensive or defensive,against any space/celestial body or against an Earth-bound target—would effectively turn space objects into potential targets and turn outer space into a potential conflict zone.”⁷

Yet despite the risk of “mishaps, misperceptions and miscalculations”,⁸ there exists no “legally binding instrument dealing with … the prevention of an arms race in outer space”.⁸ Nor are there “legally binding rules to refrain from creating space debris”,⁷ yet such debris can collide, including with nuclear power sources in outer space, ⁹ and generate “more debris, in a cycle popularly known as the ‘Kessler syndrome’”,¹⁰ which posits “an exponential growth of orbital debris as time progresses, with an ever-increasing risk for operational bodies in orbit. … With regular launch rates and no mitigation measures, the quantity of debris in orbit is likely set to grow exponentially.”¹¹

In this legal void, “[m]assive constellations of … satellites in low-Earth orbit are being planned and manufactured that … will blanket the globe in low-latency, high-bandwidth capacity” in order to expand the reach of the global Internet to rural and remote areas and complement terrestrial 5G networks.¹² 

Permitting commercial entities from current spacefaring states to place tens of thousands of 5G satellites in the already congested—and contested—Earth orbits in the absence of a legally binding regime governing activities in outer space has grave implications for international peace and security. It denies equitable access to a finite resource and puts at risk social, economic, scientific and technological development; and existing satellite uses such as communications; navigation; disaster risk reduction and emergency response; greenhouse gas emission monitoring from space; air quality monitoring for aerosols and pollutants; monitoring of atmospheric processes; climate change, including essential climate variables monitoring; ozone loss monitoring; environmental protection; natural resource management; ecosystems management; biodiversity; forestry; hydrology; meteorology and severe weather forecasting; land use and land cover change monitoring; sea surface temperature and wind monitoring; seismic monitoring; environmental change; glacier mapping and studies; crop and soil monitoring; food security; irrigation; precision agriculture; groundwater detection; space weather; health impacts; security; law enforcement; mineral mapping; and urban development.¹³

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Claire Edwards, BA Hons, MA, worked for the United Nations as Editor and Trainer in Intercultural Writing from 1999 to 2017. Claire warned the Secretary-General about the dangers of 5G during a meeting with UN staff in May 2018, calling for a halt to its rollout at UN duty stations.  She part-authored, designed, administered the 30 language versions, and edited the entirety of the International Appeal to Stop 5G on Earth and in Space (www.5gspaceappeal.org) and vigorously campaigned to promote it throughout 2019. In January 2020, she severed connection with the Appeal when its administrator, Arthur Firstenberg, joined forces with a third-party group, stop5ginternational, which brought itself into disrepute at its foundation by associating with the Club of Rome/Club of Budapest eugenicist movement. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Notes

1. United Nations. Treaty Series. 610:8843. Treaty on principles governing the activities of states in the exploration and use of outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies: Art. 1. http://www.unoosa.org/oosa/en/ourwork/spacelaw/treaties/introouterspacetreaty.html.

2. United Nations Audiovisual Library of International Law. Treaty on principles governing the activities of states in the exploration and use of outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, New York, 19 December 1966. Introductory note by Vladimír Kopal, Professor of International Law, West Bohemian University, Pilsen, Czech Republic; Chairman, Legal Subcommittee of the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (1999 to 2004 and 2008 to 2010). http://legal.un.org/avl/ha/tos/tos.html.

Accessed June 6, 2019.

3. Rose FA. Safeguarding the heavens: The United States and the future of norms of behavior in outer space. Brookings Institution. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/FP_20180614_safeguarding_the_heavens.pdf. Accessed June 6, 2019..

4. United Nations. Debating proposals on common principles to ensure outer space security, FirstCommittee delegates call for adoption of legally binding treaty. Press release GA/DIS/3557. October 2016.

www.un.org/press/en/2016/gadis3557.doc.htm. Accessed June 6, 2019.

5. United Nations. Official Records of the General Assembly, Seventy-first Session, Supplement No. 20.A/71/20;2016:annex. Guidelines for the long-term sustainability of outer space activities: Guideline 4. www.unoosa.org/oosa/documents-and-resolutions/search.jspx?view=&match=A%2F71%2F20. The Guidelines are voluntary and not legally binding. Accessed June 6, 2019.

6. Secure World Foundation. Space sustainability: A practical guide. 2014:14. https://swfound.org/media/121399/swf_space_sustainability-a_practical_guide_2014__1_.pdf. Accessed June 6, 2019.

7. Kozin VP. Militarization of outer space and its impacts on global security environment. Pakistan National University of Sciences and Technology, Global Think Tank Network; 2015. http://www.space4peace.org/articles/Militarization%20of%20Outer%20Space%20and%20its%20Impacts%20on%20Global%20Security.pdf. Accessed June 6, 2019.

8. United Nations. Report of the Group of Governmental Experts on Transparency and Confidence-Building Measures in Outer Space Activities. A/68/189. July 29, 2013:10.

www.un.org/en/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=A/68/189. Accessed June 6, 2019.

9. United Nations. General Assembly resolution 47/68. December 14, 1992. Principles relevant to the use of nuclear power sources in outer space. http://www.unoosa.org/oosa/en/ourwork/spacelaw/principles/nps-principles.html. Accessed June 6, 2019.

10. Kessler DJ, Landry PM, Cour-Palais BG, Taylor RE. Aerospace: Collision avoidance in space: Proliferating payloads and space debris prompt action to prevent accidents. IEEE Spectrum. 1980;17(6):37-41.

11. United Nations. National research on space debris, safety of space objects with nuclear power sources on board and problems relating to their collision with space debris. A/AC.105/C.1/2017/CRP.12. January 27, 2017. http://www.unoosa.org/res/oosadoc/data/documents/2017/aac_105c_12017crp/aac_105c_12017crp_12_0_html/AC105_C1_2017_CRP12E.pdf. English Accessed June 6, 2019.

12. International Telecommunication Union; United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development. Working Group on Technologies in Space and the Upper-Atmosphere. Identifying the potential of new communications technologies for sustainable development. September 2017. https://www.broadbandcommission.org/Documents/publications/WG-Technologies-in-Space-pdf.  Accessed June 6, 2019.

13. United Nations. Official Records of the General Assembly, Sixty-first Session, Supplement No. 20.A/73/20;2018. https://cms.unov.org/dcpms2/api/finaldocuments?Language=en&Symbol=A/73/20. Accessed June 6, 2019.

Four days of coverage of D-Day on CBC radio and no one explains “free world”. After seventy-five years, everyone knows what it is.

Evolutionary biologist Steven Jay Gould said nothing is as dangerous as what “everyone knows” but no one remembers the arguments for. Che Guevara called out the US president, at an economics conference, for what “everyone knows” democracy is.[i] Guevara said the conference was political, not about economics.  JFK made no arguments.

But there were arguments and Che Guevara knew them. He refuted them, as Gould refuted scientific arguments for white supremacy. Today the arguments for “free world” are forgotten, even by some who study such things. Nothing is as dangerous as ideology not recognized as ideology.

Gould knocks out one peg of that ideology: an idea of reason.  Evolution has no final purpose, Gould argued. It aims for no ideal. Yet if you wind back the tape of evolution to any point, the next steps are constrained by myriad causal factors.[ii] Gould used the word “contingency”. It means dependence.

Marx had this view of reason, radically contingent upon circumstances and conditions. He got part of his view from Hegel, who saw reality structured organically and developmentally.[iii] Marx accepted Hegel’s vision but found Hegel’s explanation “mystical.” For Marx, it was just a fact that the world is structured dialectically, and so the best way to know it is in terms of organic tendencies and systems.

Einstein agreed. He criticized US schools for emphasizing end results: success. Students should feel their relationship to their work, knowing through their own bodies how engagement with the world creates them.  When we focus on end results, we focus on what is expected, not what is. We miss out. [iv]

In theory, the view is appealing. Connectedness is trendy. Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Leonardo da Vinci upholds such a view and then denies it, in practise. Isaacson doesn’t know that he does this.[v]

He doesn’t bother with philosophy. It is not a luxury, although it seems so, the way it is done, in rarified language, accessible to few. Gramsci said everyone is a philosopher. It is because we all, at some moments of reflection, rely on ideas like “freedom” or “human”. If you don’t think critically about such ideas, you’re a slave of convention, for instance, of the “free world”.

Isaacson tells us the Mona Lisa is “a distillation of accumulated wisdom about the outward manifestations of our inner lives and about the connections between ourselves and the outer world.”  It is, we learn, “Leonardo’s profound meditation on what it means to be human.” For him, it means contingency. It is what Leonardo lived: the intersection of mind and body. It is how he saw himself.

It is how Leonardo thought. It is not how Isaacson thinks. He insists, irritatingly, that we should be like Leonardo by asking questions, as if questioning is an act of will, something decided.  In fact, we ask questions when surprised by what is unexpected, and expectations are part of who we are. Asking questions, when it matters most, is a way of letting go of expectations.

It is a kind of renunciation. We must care. Leonardo asked questions not because it is good to ask questions but because he cared about what those questions explained: what it means to be human. Caring is an orientation. It is not something you do because your life coach tells you to.

And this is how the book ends: talking points for a life-coach. We get a list, for an entire chapter: We are to “retain a childlike sense of wonder”, “go down a rabbit hole”, “start with details”, “get distracted”, “procrastinate”, “make lists”, and on and on. A formula.

If we learn anything from Leonardo’s life, it is that the intersections his art expressed are not formulaic.  No formula. But why look for one? It is for control. We can’t trust relations.

Sensitivity to relations is insecure.  No straight lines in nature, Leonardo noted. He knew we are part of the unfolding of the universe, complex and mysterious, but beautiful for being so.  We are not discreet beings, the lie of the “free world”. We live well, and better, without complete control: because of contingency. Marx knew this too. So did Lenin and others not part of the “free world”.

Feminism, since the 80s, is the area of scholarship in North American universities most attentive to relations, most expressive of Marx’s dialectical vision (although he doesn’t get much credit). The ends-dependent view of reason is refuted by insistence on interdependence.

But the vision is elusive. The Apology, by radical feminist Eve Ensler, is an imagined letter from her father, dead 31 years, apologizing for abuse.  Why it is liberating for the abused to tell this story, so long after the fact, as if it is the father’s story, when in fact it is not? Why invent a story about oneself, conforming to one’s own expectations, as a “way to be free”?

We don’t get an answer. Perhaps “everyone knows”, and the arguments are forgotten. Interestingly, in 7,200 pages of notes, covering a remarkable range of scientific passions, Leonardo says little about himself.  Or so says Isaacson. In fact, it is all about himself. Leonardo knew human beings by intensely studying nature.  He knew himself that way.

We know ourselves, as human, through dependence, through solidarity. This is part of the argument against the forgotten arguments for the “free world”.  It is a more interesting vision, acknowledging the myriad causal relations constituting human community and through which we know that community, and ourselves.

As Patrick Mondiano describes in Sleep of Memory, such encounters might “drag you in their wake when they disappear”. But they’re real.

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Susan Babbitt is author of Humanism and Embodiment (Bloomsbury 2014). She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Notes

[i] Punta del Este, Uruguay, 1961

[ii] Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (Norton 1989)

[iii] A. Wood Karl Marx (Routledge 2004) 197ff

[iv] Ideas and opinions (Wings 1958)

[v] This book is reviewed at https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/along with the two referenced below.

The 3rd International Conference “No to Military Bases & Wars” (1) takes place in a country where the legal situation allows to eliminate all military facilities of USA and NATO, namely by terminating the “Convention on the Presence of Foreign Forces in the Federal Republic of Germany” (in short: troop deployment treaty) and withdrawing from NATO, namely with a period of notice of only two years or one year (2)(3). In May 2019, the IPPNW accordingly demanded by an overwhelming majority at its general meeting in Stuttgart that the troop deployment treaty be terminated (4).

In April 2019, a Conference in Florence called for an “international NATO withdrawal front” is an initiative of the Italian No Guerra, No NATO Committee and the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)(5). 

In October 2018, a unanimous decision was taken in Frankfurt to make the demand to terminate the troop deployment treaty a central demand of the “Stop Air Base Ramstein” campaign (6). These are encouraging, groundbreaking steps.

With great expectations, the signatories – even if they cannot all be on site – are now looking forward to the results of the 3rd International Conference “No to Military Bases & Wars” at Ramstein. This conference offers the opportunity to reaffirm and further internationalise the groundbreaking steps taken by Stuttgart, Florence and Frankfurt. According to the conference programme, the aim is to discuss what we can do against the military bases. And proposals for further action are needed. Agreements are to be reached in this regard. We therefore propose that the following agreement be adopted.

The conference “No to Military Bases & Wars” states:

We support the demand of Florence for the formation of an “international NATO withdrawal front” and call on peace initiatives in all NATO countries to make this demand their own. According to the NATO Treaty, the withdrawal from NATO is possible with one year’s notice. We also support the demand made for Germany to terminate the troop deployment treaty with the consequence that all US and NATO military bases, including nuclear weapons, must disappear from Germany within only two years. We call on peace initiatives in other countries to clarify the legal situation in their country and on this basis to make demands with the appropriate objective – with the consequence that all these countries will be freed from US and NATO military bases.

Signers for the campaign “NATO Out – Out of NATO”:

Sebastian Bahlo (stellv. Vorsitzender des Deutschen Freidenker-Verbands),

Peter Betscher (Bundesverband Arbeiterfotografie, Vorstand),

Toni Brinkmann (Juristin, Mitglied des Bremer Friedensforums),

Anneliese Fikentscher (Vorsitzende des Bundesverbands Arbeiterfotografie),

Klaus Hartmann (Vorsitzender des Deutschen Freidenker-Verbands),

Senne Glanschneider (Bundesverband Arbeiterfotografie, Vorstand),

Samira Jouini (Deutscher Freidenker-Verband, Landesvorstand NRW),

Wolfgang Jung (LUFTPOST – Friedenspolitische Mitteilungen aus der US-Militärregion Kaiserslautern/Ramstein),

Jürgen Kelle, Düsseldorf (Rentner),

Dr. Ansgar Klein (Sprecher der Aachener Aktionsgemeinschaft “Frieden jetzt!”),

Helene Klein (Sprecherin der Würselener Initiative für den Frieden),

Ullrich Mies (Publizist/Autor),

Andreas Neumann (Bundesverband Arbeiterfotografie, Vorstand),

Klaus v. Raussendorff (Mitglied im Vorstand des Deutschen Freidenker-Verbands),

Wilhelm Schulze-Barantin (Deutscher Freidenker-Verband, Landesvorsitzender Hessen),

Ernesto Schwarz (Musiker, Mitglied des Deutschen Freidenkerverbandes),

Brigitte Streicher (Deutscher Freidenker-Verband, Landesvorsitzende NRW),

Fee Striefler (LUFTPOST – Friedenspolitische Mitteilungen aus der US-Militärregion Kaiserslautern/Ramstein),

Jürgen Suttner (Mitglied im Siegener Friedensbündnis ABFS und im Freidenkerverband),

Annette van Gessel (Lektorin),

Georg Maria Vormschlag (Bundesverband Arbeiterfotografie, Vorstand),

Christoph Vohland (Deutscher Freidenker-Verband, Landesvorstand NRW)

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Notes

1 Dritte Internationale Konferenz “No to Military Bases & Wars”, Ramstein, 28.06.2019
https://www.ramstein-kampagne.eu/no-to-military-bases/

2 Im Zuge des “Vertrags über die abschließende Regelung in Bezug auf Deutschland” (2+4-Vertrag) vollzogener Notenwechsel zum Vertrag über den Aufenthalt ausländischer Streitkräfte in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland vom 25.9.1990 (Bundesgesetzblatt 1990, Teil II, S. 1390-1393)
http://www.arbeiterfotografie.com/galerie/kein-krieg/hintergrund/bgbl290042_99955.pdf

3 NATO-Vertrag, Artikel 13 (Kündigung)
http://www.abg-plus.de/abg2/ebuecher/abg_all/Artikel13K%C3%BC.htm

4 IPPNW-Beschluss zur Kündigung des Truppenstationierungsvertrags, Stuttgart, 03.-05.05.2019
http://www.nrhz.de/flyer/beitrag.php?id=25888 (NRhZ 704 vom 08.05.2019)
https://www.ippnw.de/commonFiles/pdfs/Verein/MV/Beschluesse_Jahrestreffen_2019.pdf

5 Abschlusserklärung des Komitees “NO GUERRA NO NATO/GLOBAL RESEARCH” “Für eine internationale NATO-Austrittsfront”, Florenz, 08.04.2019
http://www.nrhz.de/flyer/beitrag.php?id=25835 (NRhZ 702 vom 24.04.2019)
https://nowarnonato.blogspot.com/2019/04/deutsch.html
https://nowarnonato.blogspot.com/2019/04/english-declaration-of-florence-for.html

6 Beschluss der Kampagne “Stopp Air Base Ramstein” zur Kündigung des Truppenstationierungsvertrags, Frankfurt, 28.10.2018
http://www.nrhz.de/flyer/beitrag.php?id=25339 (NRhZ 680 vom 31.10.2018)

Global Research Editor’s Note

The records of the Stop 5G Global Appeal indicate that Poland’s Kancelaria Prezesa Rady Ministrow (Chancellery of the Council of Ministers), which is chaired by Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki has “signed” the appeal under the Category “Organizations”, scroll down to Poland.  (see screenshot below)

There has, however, been no official confirmation from the Polish government of this historic decision.

And there has been no coverage of the issue by the mainstream media.

The Prime Minister’s alleged endorsement of the Appeal is on behalf of the Chancellery of the Council of Ministers. Was this entry undertaken by the Chancellery of the Council of Ministers? Has this “entry” on the Stop 5G Appeal been verified. Did the Chancellery confirm?

There is no record of a decision pertaining to 5G on the home page of the Chancellery of the Council of Ministers. 

A recent report by the Polish media suggests that the Warsaw government (in the context of the dispute with China’s Huawei) intends to  approach the 5G issue in a coordinated fashion “across the EU” rather than at the level of individual EU member countries.

In December, according to PRNewswire (December 18, 2018),

“T-Mobile Polska launched [in December 2018] the first fully functional fifth generation mobile network in Poland – its coverage is currently available in the centre of Warsaw. T-Mobile commits itself to investing in and continuing development of the 5G network in the coming months and years, extending it to more locations and cities so it ultimately covers the entire country?

This initiative was approved by the Polish government. On December 7, 2018, representatives of T-Mobile Polska, Deutsche Telekom and the Digital Affairs Minister Marek Zagórski inaugurated the launch of Poland’s first fully functional 5G network.

Author Julian Rose (text below) concurs: the Prime Minister’s (alleged) endorsement of the Stop 5G Appeal is contradictory:

“.. That would be extraordinary because Morawiecki is due to lead his government in a major parliamentary act [mid June] in which the existing ‘accepted emissions/frequencies’ will be superceded by new 5G frequencies to enable the roll-out of 5G across the length and breadth of Poland”.

The project to be considered in the Polish parliament is no doubt pursuant to the TD-Polska, Deutsche Telecom, Ministry of Digital Affairs agreement signed in Warsaw on December 7, 2018

UPDATES: 

The International Appeal to Stop 5G on Earth and in Space welcomes the good sense of Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki in rejecting the fifth generation of wireless technology, 5G, by becoming a signatory to the Appeal.

 The Appeal is a scientific and legal document that comprehensively sets out the case against 5G, which poses an existential threat to life on Earth. The people of Poland will doubtless be greatly relieved to learn that the Prime Minister supports protecting the health and natural environment of the Polish people.

Prime Minister Morawiecki joins the ranks of the numerous other concerned lawmakers who have rejected 5G: the Swiss cantons of Vaud, Jura and Geneva, which adopted moratoria, and Neuchâtel, Bern, St Gallen and Schwyz, which are considering doing so. The Swiss and Netherlands governments, as well as the US state of New Hampshire, have demanded reports on the safety of 5G before going ahead. Lawmakers in Rome and Florence, and those of at least 21 US cities have already rejected 5G, while the Belgian Environment Minister prohibited the 5G pilot project in Brussels, declaring that citizens were not “guinea pigs”.

The 5G issue in Poland remains uncertain. What is the position of the Polish government?

It is important that people in Poland and more generally in the European Union forcefully oppose the introduction of 5G wireless technology.

 

Michel Chossudovsky. Global Research,  June 10, 2019

***

***

In what is surely an unprecedented and  groundbreaking action, the Prime Minister of Poland, Mateusz Morawiecki, has backed [in the name of the Chancellery of the Council of ministers] an International Appeal to stop the controversial roll-out of 5G electro magnetic microwave telecommunication transmissions.

5G, a new millimetre band frequency range being introduced by the telecommunications industry worldwide, has been identified by over 2,000 scientists and 1,400 medical doctors from all over the world, as presenting a direct threat to human health, as well as to animal, insect and plant life.

There have been no safety tests carried out to ensure its safety, in spite of the fact that 5G operates at between 10 and 100 times higher frequencies than current 3 and 4G cell phone tower transmitters.

The roll-out of 5G will involve the placement of millions of transmitter boxes at distances of no more than 10 to 12 houses apart in urban areas. Scientists have established that this will subject citizens living in urban areas to an unavoidable barrage of electromagnetic pollution.

A 2017 report by more than 230 scientists and doctors from 41 countries express serious concerns about steadily expanding exposure to Electro Magnet Frequencies (EMF). They state that even before the roll-out of 5G “Numerous recent scientific publications have shown that EMF affects living organisms at levels well below most national and international guidelines.” *

These effects include cancer risk, cellular stress, increase in harmful free radicals, genetic damages, structural and functional changes to the human reproductive system, learning and memory defects, neurological disorders and negative impacts on general well-being in humans. Damage goes well beyond humans, as there is mounting evidence of deleterious effects to both plants and animals.

In Poland, the public are being used as guinea pigs in a 5G experiment to test the efficacy of the technology. The following cities are being used in the trial: Warsaw, Lodz, Gliwice.

The same procedure is taking place all over Europe, North America and many other countries.

The World’s largest study ‘National Toxicology Program’ (NTP) revealed significant increases in the incidence of heart and brain cancer in animals exposed to EMF below the International Commission on Non Ironising Radiation Protection (ICNIRP) guidelines that are followed by most countries.

[Yet to be confirmed] The Prime Minister of Poland has taken a highly responsible step in signing the Global Appeal to Ban 5G in Earth and in Space.

He has opened the way for leaders in other countries to take the same step, thereby protecting their citizens from a potentially highly dangerous and untested technology whose repercussions for health and welfare are without precedent.

Julian Rose, June 10, 2019

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Notes

*https://www.5gspaceappeal.org/the-appeal

**https://www.5gspaceappeal.org/signatories-organizations

Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad sent shock waves in a public speech where he dismissed a Dutch “official” report blaming Russia for the downing of Malaysia Air Flight 17 in July, 2014, weeks after a CIA-led coup toppled the elected President of Ukraine. Despite the downplaying in western mainstream media of the Malaysian leader’s comments, it is creating a major new potential embarrassment for ex-Vice President Joe Biden and his Ukraine collaborators such as Igor Kolomoisky, in their flimsy effort to blame Russia for their own misdeeds.

During a dialogue with the Japanese Foreign Correspondent Club May 30, Mahathir challenged the Dutch government to provide evidence for their claim that the civilian Malaysian FH17 jet that crashed in Ukraine was shot down by a Russian-made BUK missile fired from a Russian regiment based in Kursk. The Malaysian Prime Minister told the Japanese media,

“They are accusing Russia, but where is the evidence? We know the missile that brought down the plane is a Russian type missile, but it could also be made in Ukraine.”

The blunt-spoken Mahathir added,

“You need strong evidence to show it was fired by the Russians; it could be by the rebels in Ukraine, it could be Ukrainian government because they too have the same missile.”

He went on to demand that the Malaysian government be allowed to inspect the black box of the crashed plane, stating the obvious, that the plane belongs to Malaysia, with Malaysian pilot and there were Malaysians passengers:

“We may not have the expertise but we can buy the expertise. For some reasons, Malaysia was not allowed to check the black box to see what happened.”

He went on to state,

“We don’t know why we are excluded from the examination but from the very beginning, we see too much politics in it, and the idea was not to find out how this happened, but seems to be concentrated on trying to pin it to the Russians.“

The Malaysian Air MH17 was en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur when it was shot down over the conflict zone in eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014. Only in May 2018 the Dutch-led Joint Investigation Team issued its report alleging that a BUK missile was used to shoot down Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, claiming that it originated from the 53rd Anti-aircraft Brigade of the Russian Federation, stationed in Kursk near the Ukraine border. The Dutch Joint Investigation Team (JIT) declared that it “has come to the conclusion that the BUK-TELAR that shot down MH17 came from 53rd Anti-aircraft Missile Brigade based in Kursk in Russia,” according to top Dutch investigator Wilbert Paulissen. Paulissen added, “We are convinced that our findings justify the conclusions…”

The Dutch-led group presented no concrete forensic proof, and Moscow has repeatedly denied involvement in an act that would make no military or political sense for them. In 2018 the Russian Defense Ministry provided evidence that the BUK missile which had exploded to destroy the Malaysian passenger jet had been manufactured in a Russian plant in 1986, and then shipped to the Ukraine. Its last recorded location was at a Ukrainian military base.

By recasting doubt on those Dutch JIT conclusions, Mahathir has potentially opened a can of deadly worms that could come to haunt the Ukrainian government at the time, especially Igor Kolomoisky, the billionaire Ukrainian financial backer of the newly elected Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. It potentially could also implicate then-Vice President Joe Biden and many others.

Open Questions

Independent investigators into the destruction of MH17 stress the fact that the Dutch-led JIT deliberately excluded Malaysia as well as Russia from their group, but included the CIA-backed coup regime in Ukraine, hardly an unbiased party. Further, all telephone taps the JIT has presented as proof of the guilt of the Russians came from the Ukrainian secret service SBU. Since the CIA-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014, the SBU has been involved in repeated fake accusations aimed at Russia, including faked murder of a journalist later revealed to be quite alive.

One of the central issues that the Dutch JIT group never addressed is why, at a time it was a known warzone, and commercial international flights were told to avoid the airspace in eastern Ukraine, the MH17 flight was reportedly ordered by Ukraine air traffic control authorities in Dnepropetrovsk to change course and to fly directly into the war zone. According to a Dutch site, Post Online, Eurocontrol, European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation, gave information to the Dutch Parliament about the status of Ukraine radar in 2016 informing that the Ukraine air traffic control organization UkSATSE failed to inform Eurocontrol in summer 2014 about the non-operational status of three radar systems in Eastern Ukraine, a grave violation of law. One of the three was taken in the wake of the CIA Ukraine coup in April by a masked band that destroyed the radar facility.

Further, in another breach, the Ukrainian UkSATSE refused to permit their air traffic controller atDnepropetrovsk, responsible for controlling flight MH17, to be questioned. According to Russian reports, the person “went on vacation” and never reappeared.

The Kolomoisky Factor

Notably, at the time of the MH17 downing, the Ukrainian governor of the Dnepropetrovsk Oblast or region, was Igor Kolomoisky. Kolomoisky, who is listed as the third richest man in Ukraine with an empire in oil, coal, metals and banking, was also reported to be directly linked via offshore entities to control of Burisma, the shady Ukrainian gas company that named the son of then-Vice President Joe Biden to its board.

Kolomoisky, who is notorious for hiring thugs and neo-nazis to beat up business and other opponents in Ukraine, reportedly secured the lucrative Burisma post for Hunter Biden, despite Biden’s lack of any experience in Ukraine or in oil and gas, in return for Joe Biden lifting Kolomoisky’s US visa travel ban. Joe Biden was the Obama Administration point person in charge of the 2014 CIA-orchestrated Maidan Square coup and toppling of the elected President Viktor Yanukovych.

Notably, the Mahathir remarks have drawn attention anew to the mysterious circumstances around the downing of Malaysian Air MH17 in 2014 and the potential role of Kolomoisky and others, in that. The role of corrupt Ukraine officials backed by the Obama Administration, is now under scrutiny.

Notably, the new President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, is widely reported to be a protégé of Igor Kolomoisky. Zelensky became a national name as a comedian on a Ukraine TV station owned by Kolomoisky, and the latter reportedly provided funds and personnel to run the comedian’s victorious May 2019 election campaign in which he defeated incumbent Petro Poroshenko, a bitter foe of Kolomoisky. Following Zelensky’s election victory, Kolomoisky returned to Ukraine after exile in Switzerland following a bitter falling out with Petr Poroshenko in 2015.

All these pieces of a very murky geopolitical puzzle underscore the dirty role that Ukraine and the Obama administration have played in demonizing Russia as well as the Trump Administration. Most recently, it appears that the US Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his staff, relied on a Ukrainian businessman named Konstantin Kilimnik, who worked for Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, as the key figure supposedly linked to Russian intelligence, as a key figure to make the case of Russian collusion or interference in the 2016 US elections.

Far from a Putin agent, however, new evidence shows that Kilimnik, since at least 2013 was a confidential Ukrainian informant to the US State Department, according to US journalist John Solomon. Solomon cites FBI documents including State Department emails he has seen where Kilimnik is described as a “sensitive” intelligence source for the US State Department. The Mueller report left that embarrassing detail out for some reason. Kilimnik worked for Paul Manafort who before the 2014 Ukraine coup had served as a lobbyist for Ukrainian elected president Viktor Yanukovych and his Party of the Regions.

Their shadowy acts in Ukraine may soon come to haunt key figures in Ukraine such as Kolomoisky, as well as people like Joe Biden and family. From the true authorship of the downing of MH17, which Dutch and other investigators believe was linked to Kolomoisky actors, to the Ukraine business dealings of Hunter Biden to the true facts of the Mueller “Russiagate” probe, all could well prove to be a far more revealing investigation for the US Justice Department than the obviously biased Mueller probe has been. Increasingly it is looking like the Ukraine and not Russia is the more likely source for interference in the 2016 US election, and not in the way we have been told by the establishment media such as CNN.

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F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published.

He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Featured image is from NEO

---

Seeds of Destruction: Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation

Author Name: F. William Engdahl

ISBN Number: 978-0-937147-2-2

Year: 2007

Pages: 341 pages with complete index

List Price: $25.95

Special Price: $18.00

 

This skilfully researched book focuses on how a small socio-political American elite seeks to establish control over the very basis of human survival: the provision of our daily bread. “Control the food and you control the people.”

This is no ordinary book about the perils of GMO. Engdahl takes the reader inside the corridors of power, into the backrooms of the science labs, behind closed doors in the corporate boardrooms.

The author cogently reveals a diabolical world of profit-driven political intrigue, government corruption and coercion, where genetic manipulation and the patenting of life forms are used to gain worldwide control over food production. If the book often reads as a crime story, that should come as no surprise. For that is what it is.

On May 27th the president of Serbia Aleksandr Vucic urged to face the truth and to recognize that Serbia lost Kosovo. On May 28th units of the Kosovar police intruded into Serb districts in the north of Kosovo and arrested about two-dozen people, including Kosovo police officers of Serbian nationality and also one Russian employee of the UN Mission in Kosovo.

As a result Vucic was forced to put the Serbian army and police special forces on full alert. The crisis hasn’t yet gained further development. However we once again were shown that peace in the Balkans is extremely fragile and can explode into a new war at any moment.

A provocation in the conditions of capitulation

There is a logical question: why did the president of the self-proclaimed Kosovo Hashim Thaçi choose to organise this provocation precisely at the moment when the leadership of Serbia was the closest it has ever been to capitulation in relation to the Kosovo question.

After all, the actions of the Albanian police not only excited Serbian radicals, but gave them a fine argument against the capitulatory politics of the government. Aleksandr Vucic, who hasn’t received unambiguous support in relation to the Kosovo question neither from his own party nor from Serbian society, is forced to take a harder line. Moreover, if on this occasion everything ended in a military demonstration, next time bringing the army to full combat readiness may not be enough to calm Serbian society, and a military conflict will erupt despite the politicians’ lack of desire to kindle one.

However, when we speak about the lack of desire to start a war, we are speaking about Serbian politicians. In Belgrade pro-West politicians and also the moderate nationalists from the Serbian Progressive Party of Vucic, who distanced themselves in the past from the irreconcilable Serbian Radical Party of Vojislav Šešelj, still keep the country on the course towards integration into the EU.

However, the illusoriness of prospects of accession to the European Union and the provocative actions of the Albanian authorities of Kosovo undermines the positions of conciliators, clearing the road for radicals to come to power.

Why does Hashim Thaçi need another conflict with Serbia? After all, Kosovo is under his control, and the West recognised the independence of the self-proclaimed state and, like the current Serbian authorities, seeks to solve the crisis, even at the price of maximum concessions, actually on Albanian conditions.

Hashim Thaçi knows very well that Vucic, since the moment he was inaugurated as the president of Serbia on June 1st 2017, started to implement the pro-European course, which stipulates Serbia’s recognition of Kosovo’s independence. Moreover, Thaçi, after a meeting with Vucic on July 3rd 2017, radiated optimism and said that he believes in the possibility of reconciliation between Serbs and Albanians “for the benefit of Kosovo, Serbia, and all the region”. Thaçi also knows very well that the internal political problems facing Vucic in connection with his intention to accept the conditions of Pristina for solving the Kosovo question.

Succeeding to gain a foothold before the West becomes completely weak

Let’s not multiply essence needlessly. If such an inveterate politician as Thaçi, obviously provokes a conflict, in conditions when, seemingly, he can achieve his objectives peacefully, it means that he needs a conflict. Otherwise he would not start to disrupt the peace initiative of Vucic, organising a terrorist raid of the Albanian police in the Serb regions of Kosovo. Even a child could calculate the consequences of such a step.

But if we came to the conclusion that Hashim Thaçi deliberately provokes the conflict, then the question “why does he do it?” still demands an answer.

I think that we will not be mistaken if we say that the general weakening of the West is the main reason for the provocative behaviour of the Albanian leaders of Kosovo. One should not forget that only thanks to the Americans, who unleashed military operations against Yugoslavia and involved their NATO allies in them, Kosovo was pulled away from the control of the Yugoslavian authorities.

And it is also Washington that organized the recognition by the West of the self-proclaimed independence of Kosovo. Therefore, the current Kosovo authorities can feel more or less assured only while standing behind the West.

But if the West weakens, it may not have enough forces (or desire) to provide military-political cover for the Kosovar regime. In several years there can be a situation in which nobody will be able to prevent Serbia from performing an operation aimed at restoring the constitutional order in Kosovo.

Albania is not eager to fraternize with Kosovo criminals

Its inclusion into the structure of Albania could become one of the ways of retaining control over the region.

But neither the president of Albania Ilir Meta, nor the Prime Minister Edi Rama, nor the ruling Socialist Party of Albania are eager to introduce drug dealers, human traffickers, and war criminals like Hashim Thaçi or his Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj into Albanian politics. And the Albanian democrats, who are in opposition to the government of socialists, do not at all seek a potential union with Kosovo radicals.

Not only and perhaps also not so much because persons who are too picturesque gathered in the Kosovar leadership, but because they are afraid that if Kosovo integrates into Albania, the leaders of militants will gain too much authority among voters, and in addition to this they will be able to use their (specific) methods of conducting a political fight and will simply force the current Albanian leaders out to the periphery of big-time politics, having secured the leading posts. Something similar occurred in the past in Armenia, where the so-called Karabakh clan (politicians who originate from the unrecognized Nagorno-Karabakh Republic) came to power in 1998 and held on until 2018.

In general Albania, which endured an internal political crisis while being on the verge of civil war in January-March 1997, and which managed to overcome it only thanks to the introduction of a UN military contingent into the country, obviously does not intend to receive, together with the integration of Kosovo, ambitious radical politicians who will lay claims to power not in Pristina any more, but in Tirana.

Thaçi hurries to finish the ethnic cleaning of Kosovo Serbs

If the Albanian scenario does not play out, Hashim Thaçi has only one opportunity to be prepared for that moment when the West will not able to ensure the security of the Kosovar regime. Taking into account the number of war crimes committed by its leaders, as soon as Serbia has an opportunity to deal with Kosovo without being afraid of the West’s intervention, a legitimate reason to return the Serbian army to the region will be found.

But if completely to force out of Kosovo the Serbs who now remain only in several areas, bordering with Serbia, in the north, then Belgrade formally will have nobody to defend. On the contrary, it will be possible to present the conflict to the international community as the genocide of the Albanian population of the region. After all, in order to return Serbs to Kosovo it will be necessary to expel the Albanians who occupied their homes.

Hashim Thaçi is in a hurry to finish the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, to turn the region into a monoethnic Albanian formation in order to prevent Serbia from laying down any claims to return in the long term.

In the present situation if Serbia tries to impede the actions of Pristina through armed force, Thaçi can count on the military support of the West. Serbia can resist the West only by leaning on Russia. But then, the Serbian euro-integrators who are in power will be forced to abandon their goal – the entry of Serbia into the European Union. I.e., aggravating the crisis over Kosovo is today unprofitable to the government in Belgrade, because even if the conflict is resolved, even in a way that is victorious for Serbia, it will lead to the reformatting of all the Serbian political landscape.

The moves are calculated, there is one, very essential “but”

As we see, Thaçi’s actions are rather well calculated and directed towards the creation of a situation whereby overthrowing the power of the Albanian radicals in Kosovo would become impossible. He risks a conflict with Serbia, which Kosovo will certainly lose if the Belgrade politicians risk to completely and unconditionally turn towards a union with Russia. But this risk is not so high as it seems at first sight, because Aleksandr Vucic firmly toes the European integration line, which a victorious conflict with Kosovo will ruin. Thaçi expects that in order to not lose euro-integration prospects, the Serbian leaders will close their eyes to the completion of the ethnic cleansing of the Serbs in Kosovo, and that his demarches, like bringing the army to combat readiness, will never pass into the practical plane.

As a last resort he hopes to have the military support of the West, which cannot allow the liquidation of independent Kosovo – its own project – without a catastrophic loss of face.

The only non-calculated factor is Serbian society’s reaction to the provocations of Thaçi. It is rather strongly overheated by the fight between nationalists and euro-integrators, and the idea of a return match in Kosovo is nearly the most popular in the most different segments of the population. At some point the situation in Serbia can exit the control of politicians and then a military conflict will become unavoidable.

Moreover, the progressing weakening of the West leads to the same consequences. Not only are the traditional clients of Washington in Kosovo fussing, trying to strengthen their position while America can still cover them, but also the Serbian leaders gradually come to understand the hopelessness of European integration and reorientate towards Russia.

Thus, Moscow and Washington were already indirectly drawn into the Balkan crisis on different sides of the barricades.

At the same time, the US gradually loses control over their clients from Pristina, who start to act by the principle “the tail wags a dog”, trying to create situations in which America will be obliged to involve itself in an unnecessary-to-it confrontation in their interests.

Time plays on the side of Russia and Serbia, which after a while will be able to dominate in the Balkans without an unnecessary and dangerous military confrontation. That’s why Thaçi is in a hurry, provoking a crisis now, while he still has hope for a favourable outcome.

*

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This article was translated by Ollie Richardson and Angelina Siard of The Saker.

All images in this article are from The Saker

I had not intended to watch this program, a CBC special documentary hosted/narrated by Peter Mansbridge, the CBC’s retired chief correspondent and national news anchor.  However, as it came on during prime pre-dinner time viewing I thought that I should watch it in order to find out some of the current political spin within Canada’s establishment.

It was rather underwhelming but also informative, not for what it said, but for what it did not say.  A general summary of its main points covers three main ideas:  first it is great support for the military industrial complex; second, it promoted active militarism; finally it supported the concept that we have been at peace for 75 years.

The introduction was a whirlwind through World War II, its aftermath in setting up the Bretton Woods group, the Washington consensus to control global finances, and then on through a precise of today’s “threats”.  What was missing was context, and a whole lot of other information.

Along with U.S. right wing commentaries from Robert Kagan (husband of Victoria Nuland of Ukraine’s Maidan cookie fame) and the RAND organization, Max Hastings, a British “journalist” served as one of the prime speakers.  From Canada’s right wing think tank, the Munk School, Margaret MacMillan offered some anodyne platitudes relating to the overall topic.

Planned for a D-Day presentation, the documentary starts there, as one of the greatest battles of human history.  While Russia is given some credit for its participation in the war, it was not recognized as being the force that broke the German war machine, turning the tide at Stalingrad.  While Hitler was pictured as the evil icon, nothing was mentioned of the large support U.S. corporations gave to Germany in the prewar years for the development of industries useful for a military power – automobiles, trucks, armaments, planes, synthetic oil, all saw technology transfers from the U.S.  The ultimate goal was not German conquest, but the conquest of the Soviet Union.

A whirlwind through recent events followed.  Russia, “a declining power”, under Putin wanted to regain the glory of the Soviet empire, and demonstrated its new bravado when “invading Crimea”.  According to Hastings, Russia did not want to join the west in its liberal democracy achievements.  Except – in spite of the “shock doctrine” imposed by the Harvard boys during the Yeltsin years when the west did its best to divest Russia of its wealth, creating the very oligarchs now derided by the west – Russia did want to become a part of the western order, wanted to belong to NATO, had been promised that NATO would not move eastward after German reunification.  The west, led by the intransigence of the U.S. rebuffed all attempts to accept Russia as a trading partner wanting peace.

Then on to North Korea, where Kim Jong Un was chastised for having nuclear weapons.  Here the RAND boys indicated within their war games there was no scenario in which North Korea would not use their nuclear weapons for defending themselves, which is of course obvious and exactly why North Korea has nuclear weapons – to keep the U.S. out.  Because of that, North Korea is a “threat” to the U.S.

Finally China became the topic, and as if on cue from the U.S., it suddenly has become the largest “threat” to the U.S. and thus the west in general.  Of course for the western military establishment China should not be building bases in the South China Sea, and should not be claiming Taiwan as Chinese territory.  Mansbridge then goes on to say that “War is on China’s mind these days.”  Well, um, yeah, with the U.S. attempting to control the world through its military and its militarily supported corporations and financial institutions they should have war on their mind.  Two statistics are then cited, that China has the second largest military budget in the world and the largest budget in Asia.

The fast rise of China over the past several decades is viewed as a surprise, but anyone following China-U.S. trade would know it involved a willingness on the part of U.S. corporations to offer up technological information in order to get a grip on the Chinese market as well as to find cheap labour and resources.  In hindsight, it was not quite as fast as Germany’s rise from poverty with the assistance of U.S. corporations during the 1930s global depression.

What is not said is that the U.S. defense budget is about 3 times larger than China’s without including all the nuclear and security related monies with that.  Also not mentioned are the U.S.’ 800 or so military bases of all kinds scattered around the world, with most of them oriented towards containing China and Russia.  Nothing is mentioned of current U.S. interventions in the Middle East nor the even more current examples of the U.S. openly extolling the desire to get rid of other countries’ governments, regardless of international law.  Israel is mentioned in passing shortly after in the presentation of cyber warfare with the stuxnet virus, but no mention is made of its role in U.S. interventions in the Middle East nor its manipulations and meddling of the U.S. government in its domestic elections.

At this point Mansbridge introduced the idea of Russian election meddling, citing “cyber trolls” as the problem. And Russian “micro targeting” Ukrainian soldiers in order to find their field positions saying also they have “nothing on China” who watch their own people and spy on others.  Well golly….nothing the U.S. nor Canada does of course.

After the discourse on cyber war and artificial intelligence in war, none of it very informative, the discussion comes to “no one wants to end up at war” – except maybe John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, Mike Pence and millions of other evangelical rapture warriors.

Canada’s Chief of Defense Staff, Jonathan Vance is among those who would not be bothered by a good little war.  He strongly supports NATO as it stands for peace and stability – except for places like Yugoslavia, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Turkey, Ukraine.  Hastings returns with a call to educate everyone to be able to see the threat – in other words to see the need to keep the military industrial complex alive and well.

Mansbridge’s final platitude is about “an enduring peace” as he had witnessed during his lifetime. But what he “witnessed” is a lie, with the “peace” only being available to those countries that bowed down to U.S. demands and had something the U.S. wanted in the way of resources, mostly oil, but also many other agricultural and non-renewable resources.  Iran, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras, Vietnam, Chile, Granada, Zaire/Congo, Brazil, Iraq, Syria, Libya, North Korea, Venezuela and many others did not find “peace” within the western liberal order but mostly destruction, hostility, and destructive sanctions.  It never was about freedom and democracy as witnessed by the absolutist monarchies of Saudi Arabia and the Arab gulf states along with the many covert operations overthrowing popularly elected governments, but about control of oil, and control of the power of U.S. financial institutions and corporations.

The Future of War is a window into the shallow rationalizations that keep the western world – the U.S., NATO, and other allies (notably Australia) – priming the pump for war.  Not a war caused by their own imperial efforts when losing control of their empire, but a war supposedly caused by the militarization and imperial desires of both China and Russia.  It is a shallow presentation suitable only for ignorant western audiences.

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Jim Miles is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

A future without independent media leaves us with an upside down reality where according to the corporate media “NATO deserves a Nobel Peace Prize”, and where “nuclear weapons and wars make us safer”.

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Israel’s Attack on The USS Liberty: An Act of War, A False Flag, A Gross Betrayal

By Craig McKee, June 09, 2019

It is one of the greatest lies that most Americans – in fact most people around the world – have never heard of. And it reveals much about the true relationship between the United States and one of its “closest allies,” the State of Israel.

USS Liberty 1967: Israel Murdered U.S. Sailors and Tried to Sink Their Ship … A Failed False Flag Attack Against the U.S.

By Washington’s Blog, June 08, 2019

After the attack was thought to have ended, three life rafts were lowered into the water to rescue the most seriously wounded. The Israeli torpedo boats returned and machine-gunned these life rafts at close range.

An Israeli Double-Feature: 52nd Anniversary of Israel’s Attack on the USS Liberty

By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, June 08, 2019

The White House, fearing the Israel Lobby, prevented the US Navy from going to the defense of the Liberty, thus sacrificing American lives, and further dishonored the US Navy by ordering Admiral McCain, father of the former US Senator John McCain, to orchestrate a cover-up.

New Evidence Proves Israel Attacked USS Liberty With Orders to Kill 294 Americans

By Aaron Nelson, June 08, 2019

Israel apologized to the United States and for several decades we’ve been led to believe that this could be the only explanation for why Israeli jets and torpedo boats would launch rockets, missiles and torpedoes at an American target for more than two hours.

History of World War II: America Was Providing Military Aid to the USSR, While Also Supporting Nazi Germany

By Evgeniy Spitsyn, June 07, 2019

Specifically, the USSR received 2,586,000 tons of aviation fuel, an amount equal to 37% of what was produced in the Soviet Union during the war, plus almost 410,000 automobiles, making up 45% of the Red Army’s vehicle fleet (not counting cars captured from the enemy).

The 75th Anniversary of the Allied D-Day Liberation of Nazi-Occupied Western Europe. A Civilizational Provocation, Russia was Not Invited

By Andrew Korybko, June 05, 2019

The decision not to invite President Putin to attend the 75th D-Day commemoration event was a civilizational provocation aimed at dividing the European Allies during World War II and reinforcing the historically revised notion that the Soviet Union was an “accidental ally” during the conflict.

History of World War II: Nazi Germany was Financed by the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England

By Yuri Rubtsov, July 13, 2018

The total amount of foreign investments in German industry during 1924-1929 amounted to almost 63 billion gold Marks (30 billion was accounted for by loans), and the payment of reparations — 10 billion Marks.

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Russian President Putin and Pakistani Prime Minister Khan will reportedly have their first-ever meeting later this week during the SCO Summit in the Kyrgyz capital of Bishkek, but while the symbolism of this possible interaction shouldn’t be downplayed, observers also shouldn’t get their hopes up for unrealistic outcomes.

A Monumental Meeting

The Russian-Pakistani Strategic Partnership has rapidly developed in the span of only a few years to such a point that President Putin and Prime Minister Khan will reportedly have their first-ever meeting later this week during the SCO Summit in the Kyrgyz capital of Bishkek, which will certainly be a very symbolic interaction if it comes to pass. Pakistan’s Dunya News disclosed that the country’s Foreign Minister, Minister of External Affairs, and other officials will also attend the prospective meeting, suggesting that their Russian counterparts will probably be in attendance as well. In the run-up to this event, the prospects look very promising for taking Russian-Pakistani relations to the next level, though observers shouldn’t get their hopes up for unrealistic outcomes.

Tempering Expectations

First-time face-to-face meetings such as this upcoming one are usually a formality for both leaders to get to know one another after the quiet behind-the-scenes work of their diplomats and other members of their permanent bureaucracies (including military and intelligence officials) made the meeting possible in the first place. National leaders are so busy handling an ever-changing variety of affairs that they oftentimes don’t have the time to manage specific bilateral relations except in very special cases, such as Russia and Pakistan’s ties with their shared Chinese partner for example. It’s therefore unlikely that President Putin and Prime Minister Khan played much of a hands-on role in their countries’ bilateral ties up until this point.

Talking Business

That might soon change after their upcoming meeting, however, since it’s very possible that the top decision makers in these two Great Powers will discuss the most important big ticket items on their shared agenda. Russia signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Pakistan last year to explore the possibility of building a $10 billion gas pipeline, and the influential Moscow-based Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies (CAST) estimated in their recently released book “Pakistan: Beyond Stereotypes” that the South Asian state could potentially buy upwards of $9 billion in military equipment from Russia in the future. On top of that, Russia and Pakistan have synchronized their approaches to the Afghan peace process and each of them now has extremely close political ties with the Taliban, especially after Islamabad facilitated Moscow’s hosting of the group several times over the past year.

Symbolism Before Substance

These three topics — the $10 billion energy MOU, the possibility of up to $9 billion in arms sales, and the Taliban-led Afghan peace process that they both support — are the most likely to be discussed during President Putin and Prime Minister Khan’s first-ever face-to-face meeting, but whatever they might agree upon in these respects will probably remain secret for now until something tangible such as an energy, arms, and/or peace deal comes out of their joint efforts. Therefore, observers can probably expect a lot of symbolism and extremely promising statements about the future of bilateral relations but little else at this point, except of course for Prime Minister Khan to invite President Putin to Pakistan like has been previously reported.

Context Is Everything

The geostrategic context in which that invitation might be presented increases the odds that it would be accepted, especially if the two leaders ultimately clinch a significant enough deal with one another to warrant President Putin’s time in becoming the first Russian leader to ever visit Pakistan. His country is engaged in a fast-moving “Return to South Asia“, after all, and Pakistan is veritably the global pivot state of the emerging Multipolar World Order, so there are already enough reasons as it is for him to accept the invitation and visit Russia’s new strategic partner, but the Indian factor looms large over their bilateral relations even though the intensification of ties between Moscow and Islamabad isn’t aimed against any third party.

India’s Failed Influence Operation

It shouldn’t be forgotten that India has many powerful agents of influence within the Russian government and its policymaking circles who have been in overdrive these past few months doing all that they can to scuttle the Russian-Pakistani Strategic Partnership and prevent President Putin from visiting the global pivot state, though to the Russian leader’s credit and that of his inner circle, they’ve remained impervious to these ever-hysterical efforts and have confidently continued pioneering a new era of relations with Islamabad. Still, there are serious sensitivities inherent to his possible visit to Pakistan, which is why he’d probably have to do it either immediately before or after visiting India during the same trip in order to keep up his country’s “balancing” act.

Bye-Bye To “Rusi-Hindi Bhai Bhai”?

The only possible scenario in which President Putin would visit Pakistan without making a stop in India right before or after is if New Delhi ditches Moscow like it recently did Tehran and pulls out of the S-400 deal under American pressure in order to avoid CAATSA sanctions. In exchange, India would receive THAAD missiles and even F-35s, with the second-mentioned item only being reported this weekend as an unexpected add-on designed to make Trump’s offer all the more enticing to Modi. The US and India are military-strategic partners nowadays and New Delhi can’t afford to be punished by Washington like Ankara is about to be if it wants the Pentagon’s support in “containing” China, so Modi is more than likely to bend under Trump’s pressure.

Concluding Thoughts

In any case and returning back to the topic at hand, the upcoming meeting between President Putin and Prime Minister Khan will open up a new era of relations between these two Great Powers and greatly increase the odds that the Russian leader will eventually make history by being the first one to visit Pakistan if he accepts the reported invitation to do so. Nevertheless, his prospective visit wouldn’t just be for the sake of it but to sign a significant energy, arms, and/or peace deal that would make it worth his while to take time out of his busy schedule to travel all the way out there. Even so, however, this first-ever face-to-face meeting is extremely important for the positive signals that it sends and the long-term strategic intent that it strongly implies.

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This article was originally published on Eurasia Future.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

In December 2017, Turkey agreed to buy Russian S-400 air defense systems, categorized by military analysts as the world’s best, able to destroy multiple hostile aircraft, ballistic missiles, and other aerial targets up to 250 miles away at high and low altitudes.

China was Russia’s first foreign buyer, its military saying it “saw that the S-400 system by its capabilities today is unparalleled in the world in its armament class” — able to overcome heavy enemy fire and electronic countermeasures while effectively intercepting hostile aerial targets.

Nothing in the West matches it. On June 4, Turkish President Erdogan said it’s “out of the question” to back out of the deal, earlier saying purchase of Russian S-500s may follow when they’re available next year.

Turkish Foreign Minister Melvet Cavusoglu made similar remarks, stressing that

“(t)he deal with Russia on S-400s remains in force and these defensive systems will be delivered to Turkey” as planned, advance payment made in 2017.

On Thursday, acting Trump regime deputy assistant secretary of defense for European and NATO policy Andrew Winternitz lied, saying

“(t)he (S-400) radar system would provide Russia with military sensitive information on the F-35, which is our top-quality fifth-generation aircraft,” adding:

“From our perspective, there are no measures that can mitigate our concerns on this.”

Months earlier, State Department official Wes Mitchell warned Ankara of “consequences” if it buys Russian S-400s.

US war secretary Patrick Shanahan warned his Turkish counterpart Hulusi Akar by letter that Ankara “will not receive the F-35 if Turkey takes delivery of the S-400,” adding:

“Turkey’s procurement of the S-400 will hinder your nation’s ability to enhance or maintain cooperation with the United States and within NATO, lead to Turkish strategic and economic over-dependence on Russia, and undermine Turkey’s very capable defense industry and ambitious economic development goals.”

The Trump regime gave Turkey until end of July to pull out of the S-400 deal, pressing Erdogan to buy the inferior US Patriot missile system instead.

Ankara stressed that the S-400s won’t be integrated into NATO operability so will not not pose a threat to the alliance.

US opposition to the purchase is all about serving corporate America’s interests, along with opposing anything benefitting Russia’s economy.

If the Trump regime blocks Turkey’s purchase of F-35 warplanes and imposes other “consequences” on the country for buying S-400s, bilateral relations could be more ruptured than already, especially if sanctions are imposed.

While playing the Russia and US cards simultaneously, Erdogan increasingly shifted his allegiance East, away from the West, his chief advisor Yalcin Topcu earlier saying:

“It is time to reconsider our membership in NATO, an organization that shows its hostile attitude to its member in every way.”

Erdogan earlier threatened to remove US radar systems from Turkey if Washington fails to deliver F-35 warplanes contracted for.

Turkey’s military is second only to the US in troop strength. Pulling out of NATO would be a significant body blow to the alliance.

If unacceptable US demands and threats continue, it may be inevitable.

A Final Comment

According to Russia’s state defense company Rostec on Friday, deliveries of S-400s to Turkey will begin “within two months.”

Training Turkish personnel to operate them was completed. Installation appears set for late July or early August.

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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Featured image is from Sputnik/ Sergey Malgavko

That’s how former WTO head Pascal Lamy described the deal Trump forced Mexico to accept last week — using tariffs or their threat to pressure and bully other countries to bend to Washington’s will, Lamy adding:

“If there’s a rule of law, it’s because people believe it’s better than the law of the jungle. And many people don’t like the law of the jungle because some are strong, some are weak, and they don’t want the strong to always step on the weak.”

It’s how the US and its imperial partners operate on the world stage, exploiting and otherwise harming the great majority of people at home and abroad to benefit privileged interests exclusively.

After months of unresolved, US-initiated, trade war with China, Trump opened a new front against Mexico.

He threatened to impose 5% duties on Mexican imports effective June 10, rising to 15% on August 1, 20% on September 1, and 25% on October 1 over the flow of Central American asylum seekers, fleeing for their safety.

Mexican authorities bear no responsibility for what’s going on. International law protects the rights of refugees and asylum seekers. So does the 1980 US Refugee Act, a statutory basis for granting them asylum.

Unwanted aliens of the wrong race and ethnicity, along with Muslims from the wrong countries, are unwelcome in Trump’s America.

His immigration policy blocks them from entering the US — notably individuals fleeing repressive US-supported regimes in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, three of the world’s most violent nations.

Muslims from countries on the US target list for regime change are also included in Trump’s travel ban — affecting nationals from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen, as well as North Korea and Venezuela.

His immigration policy has nothing to do with US national security, everything to do with his hostility toward unwanted aliens.

Concessions reportedly agreed to by Mexico were offered months earlier in talks between then-Homeland Security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and Mexican interior secretary Olga Sanchez.

According to the State Department, the deal concluded on Friday includes deployment of around 6,000 Mexican National Guard forces throughout the country, especially along its southern border, to stem the flow unwanted aliens and “tak(e) decisive action to dismantle human smuggling and trafficking organizations, (as well as) their illicit financial and transportation networks.”

Both countries share a 1,954 mile border. Whatever actions are taken on the US and Mexican sides may only slow, not stop the flow of people seeking asylum in America.

In May, US border control officers apprehended over 130,000 aliens crossing from Mexico, the highest number in over a decade.

Unwanted Central American aliens reaching US territory “will be rapidly returned to Mexico where they may await the adjudication of their asylum claims” under terms of the deal reached, according to the State Department.

If measures agreed on don’t work, both countries “will take further (tougher) actions.” Bilateral discussions on this issue will continue.

The Trump regime’s policy toward unwanted aliens has nothing to do with helping “citizens of the region…build better lives for themselves and their families at home,” as the State Department falsely claimed.

It has everything to do with continuing dirty regional business as usual, uncaring about the rights and welfare of its people — ruthlessly persecuted and exploited in nations where the largest outflows come from, their regimes fully supported by Washington.

On Friday, Trump tweeted:

“I am pleased to inform you that (the US) reached a signed agreement with Mexico. The Tariffs scheduled to be implemented by the US on Monday, against Mexico, are hereby indefinitely suspended.”

About 80% of Mexican exports go to the US, giving its authorities one-sided leverage to force its will on its southern neighbor.

Former Mexican President Porfirio Diaz (1830 – 1915) once lamented that his country shared a border with the US, saying:

“Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States!”

In the mid-19th century, the US stole half the country’s territory following war it initiated. The so-called Mexican Cession includes present-day California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona, about half of New Mexico, along with parts of Colorado and Wyoming.

According to Trump, Mexico agreed to buy “large quantities” of US agricultural products. The country already is a large buyer of US farm products.

Claiming the amount will be greater sounds like typical DJT hyperbole and exaggeration to appear he extracted more concessions than what came out of talks.

The State Department’s Friday communique about what Mexican and Trump regime officials agreed on made no mention of agricultural purchases from the US in it.

Separately, Friday’s Labor Department report showed only 75,000 jobs created in May, suggesting a slowing economy.

According to economist John Williams,

the “entire gain came about only because April payrolls were revised lower by 75,000 (-75,000), on top of downside revisions to March payrolls.”

Williams believes a “major new recession continues to unfold, with a deepening, broad economic contraction evident in key economic series.” He sees Fed easing by September.

Unresolved trade war with China is making a bad situation worse, Beijing unwilling to bend to unacceptable US demands.

Friday’s US/Mexico agreement could unravel if things don’t go as planned. The US-Mexico-Canada (trade) Agreement (USMCA) is in trouble.

The Dem-controlled House leadership reportedly rejects the deal unless Big Pharma giveaways are removed, assuring increasingly unaffordable high drug prices otherwise.

Voting on the agreement is stalled until this issue is resolved, Dems using it for political advantage ahead of 2020 elections.

They’re as amenable to high drug prices as Republicans. Trump’s earlier support for lowering them was all hype with no follow-through.

Stopping the flow of asylum seekers along the US/Mexico border is unlikely to be achieved.

If Trump retaliates later this year or in 2020, along with no resolution to his trade war with China, it’ll increase the chance for US recession before next year’s elections, perhaps making him a one-term president.

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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

The foreign policy of the United States has never been rational and consistent. Its imperial ideology obfuscates the minds of its politicians who become blind to the consequences of their decisions. We have seen that clearly in their actions in Iraq, Libya, Syria and other countries. But when we look at the imperial performance of the United States in our Latin American countries, history becomes very long with interventions that invariably impose repressive rightwing governments.

We know that story very well. In fact in Venezuela we are living at this moment a brutal intervention in the form of unilateral coercive measures (sanctions) and an intensive media war that demand our resistance at a very high cost to all Venezuelans. The rulers of the United States intend to impose a “regime change” in Venezuela against any democratic rule of domestic and international law.

The Washington Post, which usually faithfully represents Washington’s policy, in its June 5 issue quotes the following words of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that were secretly recorded:

“Our conundrum, which is to keep the opposition united, has proven devilishly difficult. The moment Maduro leaves, everybody’s going to raise their hands and [say], ‘Take me, I’m the next president of Venezuela.’ It would be forty-plus people who believe they’re the rightful heirs to Maduro. ” [1]

He also claimed that this division existed from the moment he was appointed director of the CIA in 2017.

That statement reveals a fact that seems to surprise the Washington Post but it does not surprise Venezuelans. We know very well the so-called “Venezuelan opposition” minority, which should rather be called “Venezuelan obstruction” to differentiate it from the legitimate opposition that participates democratically in the political process of Venezuela.

We know very well that the only thing that obstructionists have in common is ambition and individual greedy interests. But that is a weakness rather than a unifying force, and is in opposition to the needs and values ​​of the majority of Venezuelans.

Pompeo lacks the courage to acknowledge that the United States has been the direct and responsible promoters of the creation of that obstructionist force in Venezuela for its determination to “fish in troubled waters.” And that is precisely what has made them blind and has made them trust an obstructionist unknown person like Juan Guaidó believing that Venezuelans would be fooled.

But what is important about Pompeo’s statement is what he does not mention and stands out for its omission. That is, out of those “forty-plus people”, there are millions of Venezuelans who are united. They are united by values ​​that transcend individual interests. They are united by their belief that all patriotic Venezuelans are heirs of Liberator Simón Bolívar. They are united by the defense of their right to sovereignty and independence from all foreign and colonial forces. They are united by an historic revolutionary project that was taken up from Bolivarian ideals by Commander Hugo Chávez, it is maintained by the democratic leadership of President Nicolás Maduro, and is carried out by a revolutionary people with social conscience, aware of their constitutionally granted protagonist role.

The strength of Venezuela lies in the civic-military unity that supports its institutions and rejects treason. But this solidarity force of the majority of the Venezuelan people is ignored, unknown or inconceivable by the government of the United States and that is precisely the surprise element that will win the war against any attempt of imperial intervention in Venezuela.

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Nino Pagliccia is an activist and freelance writer based in Vancouver. He is a retired researcher from the University of British Columbia, Canada. He is a Venezuelan-Canadian who follows and writes about international relations with a focus on the Americas. He is the editor of the book “Cuba Solidarity in Canada – Five Decades of People-to-People Foreign Relations” (2014). He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Note

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/exclusive-pompeo-opens-up-about-venezuelas-opposition-says-keeping-it-united-has-proven-devilishly-difficult/2019/06/05/85385a33-8eae-4ba5-a9ac-6b7b8c3d5762_story.html

Featured image: President Nicolás Maduro, 2016. (Cancillería del Ecuador via Flickr)

The following is an excerpt from Dr. Rasmus’ May 2019 interview by American Herald Tribune reporter Mohsen Abdelmoumen

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Mohsen Abdelmoumen: Why in your opinion can the capitalist system only generate crises?

Jack Rasmus: There are six major changes in the global capitalist economy since the 1970s that increase the potential fragility, instability, and the amplification and propagation rate of the fragility-instability events:

1. Greater Integration of the Former Colonial Elites into the Capitalist Global Economy as Partners

This began in the 1970s as global capitalism integrated the petro-economies, allowing them to nationalize oil and related resource production and share significantly in the revenues from that production—so long as it was understood those elites would recycle much of their income back to the capitalist core economies through direct purchases or the global banking system. In the 1980s, the US added Japan to this wealth recycling arrangement with the Plaza accords of 1986. Europe was to a lesser extent thus integrated as well via the Louvre agreements of that decade. In the 1990s it was Eastern Europe and to a lesser extent south Asia. In the 2000s it was China in part. The recycling benefited US capital greatly. US dominated institutions like the IMF and World Bank were put in service of helping facilitate the integration. The recycling was accompanied by a major acceleration of US foreign direct investment into the economies of the new partners. The dollars flowing back to the US in the form of US Treasury bonds and bills purchases allowed the US to run chronic massive budget deficits, caused by accelerating defense-war spending and simultaneous business-investor tax cutting in the amount of tens of trillions of dollars. The recycling allowed the US to build up its military into a global force on nearly all continents, with a budget of a $trillion a year, the most advanced technology, and more than 900 bases worldwide. Integration economically with the US enabled the US to more effectively wield a ‘carrot and stick’ policy within its global empire to ensure partners would adhere to its fundamental political interests in turn. But global financial and economic integration also means that crises that build and erupt in the US and/or within the key core partners of the US economic empire (aka Canada-Mexico, Japan, Europe), now more quickly spread across the integrated markets and economies. Integration increases the amplification magnitudes and propagation rates of crises.

2. Financial Restructuring of the Global Economy and the Relative Shift to Financial Asset Investing

I argued in some detail in ‘Systemic Fragility in the Global Economy’ that what has been underway since the early 1980s decade is a relative shift toward financial asset investing. This shift is structural and has not abated. In fact, technology is accelerating it. The opportunity for greater financial market profits is also a key driver. The financial asset investing shift, as I call it, has had the result of distorting real investment in plant, equipment, etc. The latter still goes on and may also grow during periods, but in relative terms it is slowing and even declining compared to financial asset investing. At the core of this is the explosion of free money provided by the central banks, made possible by the collapse of the Bretton Woods International monetary system in the 1970s.

Technology and new forms of what is money have also contributed, and increasingly so after 2000, to the explosion of credit enabled by money and near money forms. With excess credit comes excess debt—at all levels: government, banking, non-bank businesses, households, ‘external’, etc.

The magnitude of debt is not per se the problem. The failure to service that debt (i.e. pay interest and principal) is the problem, and that occurs when prices collapse (asset and goods and inputs prices). Price deflation occurs when financial asset bubbles implode. Assets are all substitutes for each other, and when one key asset collapses it has a contagion effect across others. So the price system is the transmission mechanism. This idea is quite counter to mainstream economics which purports the price system stabilizes the economy and markets via supply and demand. But that’s a myth. The price system is a destabilizer. And there isn’t just ‘one price system’, another mainstream error. There are three key price systems that are inter-related but behave differently. They are financial asset prices, goods & services prices, and in put prices (e.g. wages). The relative shift to financial asset investing tends to drive up financial asset prices into bubble range, that then bust and drag down goods and input prices in turn, causing the recession to deepen and recovery to occur slowly. But the financial asset shift and inflation has a further negative effect: it reduces productivity as real investment slows. That slows wages (price for labor) while causing greater unemployment or underemployment (especially the latter).

Financialization is measured not by the share of profits or jobs going to the banking sector. It is defined by the explosion of financial asset securities (especially derivatives), the new highly liquid markets worldwide created in which to trade those securities, and the new financial institutions that dominate that trade—i.e. what are called the shadow banking system. Around this securities, markets, and institutional new framework (that functions globally due to technology) a new global finance capital elite has emerged as the human ‘agents’ of this new global financial structure that I define as ‘financialization’. That global finance capital elite now manages more investible assets than do the traditional commercial banking system (which by the way is increasingly integrated with the shadow banking system). But the shadow banks are virtually unregulated and thus prone to engage in excess risky financial investing, which is behind the chronic shift to financial investing and the financial instability globally it is creating.

3. Global Restructuring of Labor Markets & Collapse of Unionized Labor

Not all of contemporary capitalism is of course financialized. There is still much non-financial production going on and, in the (non-financial) services sectors, actually growing. It’s just that it isn’t as profitable as financial investing and thus is getting relatively less money capital than it otherwise would for purposes of expansion. Financialization is diverting more money capital to itself relative to non-financial investing—i.e. a shift that is slowing productivity gains in the latter and, as a consequence, wages and raising underemployment as businesses cut costs in order to offset the slowing productivity and higher costs of investing in real assets.

We thus now see major transformations in labor markets worldwide that is resulting in lower wage income gains. The ‘global integration’ process in item #1 above is accompanied by the ‘offshoring’ of higher wage manufacturing and other sector jobs to the emerging markets, following the capital outflow from the capitalist core (US, Europe, Japan) to the periphery of EMEs (note: Emerging market economies). Simultaneously, businesses still producing in the core intensify their cost cutting to compete with producers in the EMEs. That means the rise of contingent labor (part time, temp, gig, etc.) which is paid less and paid fewer benefits. The rise of contingency and offshoring reduces union membership and in turn bargaining power. Whereas in the past unions recovered some of income lost during the recession and downturns during the business cycle upswing, this is no longer occurring as unionization has collapsed. The offshoring of jobs also increases worker insecurity and means less likely worker resistance to wage compression by strikes and collective bargaining. As unions decline their political influence also wanes, and with it the ability to achieve wage and benefit improvements via political action. Minimum wage legislation in particular suffers.

Labor market restructuring thus becomes a popular project of business elites and their politicians. It takes the form of job offshoring as the State increasingly subsidizes foreign direct investment. It takes the form of job creation that is now almost totally contingent in character in the advanced capitalist core of US-Japan-Europe (60%-80% of jobs created in Europe in recent decades have been contingent—part time, temp, etc.). As unions weaken economically, it means the restricting and limiting of what union labor may legally negotiate over. As unions weaken politically, it means slower legislated wage adjustments (min. wages) and cut backs in ‘social wages’ like pensions, national health insurance, etc. As union effectiveness weakens, they are attacked and removed by business action or abandoned by workers who see them ineffective in defending their interests. Business led political parties then propose national legislation to, in part, codify the changes and in part to drive them deeper.

Just as the financial restructuring of the capitalist economy leads to accelerating income and wealth accumulation by the financial elite and business class, the restructuring of labor markets had the effect of compressing and stagnation (or for some sectors of the working class even reducing) wage incomes. The former financial restructuring causes income and wealth inequality to accelerate even faster than the labor market restructuring causes wage, working class, incomes to stagnate and decline. Both restructurings result in accelerating income inequality that we see today. And with income inequality, wealth (i.e. assets) grows in turn. Conversely, more asset accumulation produces even more non-asset income inequality. So the two, income and wealth, inequality in favor of financial and business classes feed off each other to expand even further. Meanwhile wage income stagnates.

Thus de-unionization, wage compression, social benefits cut backs, job offshoring, decline of collective bargaining and strike activity, labor market ‘reform’ legislation, etc. are all the consequence (and objectives) of labor market restructuring. Labor market restructuring is largely for the benefit of those sectors of capital still mostly doing business in the domestic economy.

Financialization, subsidization by the State of foreign direct investment, and free trade agreements are largely for the benefit of the multinational corporate sector. Free trade agreements subsidize multinational corporations in two major ways: They are primarily about legalizing terms and conditions for US multinational corporate and banking penetration of other economies on favorable terms. Free trade deals also serve as a multinational corporation cost cutting aid, as corporations are able to bring back their goods and services and not pay the tariff (tax) to re-import back to the US. For example, 49% of the US’s more than $500 billion a year in goods trade deficit with China involves goods made by US corporations in China.

4. Destruction of Former Social Democratic Parties and Movements

Everywhere globally we see the collapse of social democratic parties that once dominated government. This has been true even in the ‘heartland’ of social democracy, in Europe, but also in USA, in South America, Israel, and select economies in Asia where ‘weak forms’ of social democracy previously participated. The rise of right wing ‘populism’ should be viewed as a direct result of the political vacuum created by the demise of social democracy. It is the consequence. So why have they declined? And how has this decline fueled the global integration, financial restructuring, restructuring of labor markets, the financial investing shift, and the accelerating income and wealth inequality? Those are key questions that remain largely unanswered still today among the so-called ‘left’ or ‘progressive’ movements everywhere. Some likely causes of the collapse of social democracy at the political level parallels include the destruction of their political base, the unions, and their significant loss of political influence. To some extent it has been the result of strategic errors by these parties, allowing themselves to become too closely associated with the neoliberal offensive that began circa 1980. But whatever the cause, their decline has opened the floodgates to legislative and other capitalist initiatives to restructure the capitalist financial system and capitalist labor markets globally along lines noted above. Capital has never been more powerful relative to labor than it is today. That’s why, in desperation, working classes vote in mere protest of conditions without being able to propose and promote solutions in their interest. Thus we get Brexits. Support for far right parties that promise to change the system and argue falsely the change will better the conditions of workers. That’s why we get Donald Trump. Bolsonaros and Macris in South America. Salvinis and Orbans in Europe. Dutertes in Asia. Etc. Working classes worldwide have been ‘de-organized’ both economically and politically. Into the vacuum step the far right movements, ideologues, and their parties, who take power often by default. The working classes are left with mere periodic protest votes and they vote for parties and movements that say they are going to ‘stick it to’ the capitalists that have created their declining working conditions and standard of living—even if they know little will come of that pledge.

5. Transformation of Mainstream Capitalist Political Parties

Political change has taken the form not only of the demise or rise of certain political movements and parties, but also the change in formerly ruling parties.In the US the Republican party has assumed the mantle of the far right populism. Its former challenger of the past decade, the Teaparty, has been integrated and transformed that party fundamentally.Its ideology, policy mix, and willingness to undermine democratic norms and even institutions has signified a basic change in the composition and strategy (and tactics) of the Republican party. A similar transformation to the ‘left of center’ is in the early stages with the US Democratic party.Not just in the US is this process occurring. In the UK the formerly dominant parties are in crisis and losing popular support.A ‘Brexit’ right wing populist party is emerging within the Conservative party, while the Labor party continues to lose support to nationalists and environmentalists in its ranks as well.At earlier stages a similar development is occurring in France and even Germany, where both the national front and AfD are growing support. And of course, Italy is well ahead in the rightward shift. The parties of the ‘center’ are collapsing in various stages everywhere.

These political party changes are the consequence of the intensifying income and wealth inequality, and the forces driving it associated with global capitalist economic integration, financial restructuring, and labor market restructuring.On the periphery of the political system are the demise of social democracy and rise of the populist right parties;but ‘in the middle’ as well the traditional capitalist parties are becoming fluid and experiencing internal instability.

6. Increasing Subsidization of Capital Incomes by Capitalist States

Capitalists have totally captured the direction of fiscal and monetary policy and have turned it to the benefit of their direct interests.In past periods, the primary mission of fiscal-monetary policy was to stabilize capitalist economies when recessions or goods inflation occurred. Fiscal-monetary policy was also employed in a manner that shared the benefits of such policy with working classes and other sectors. But 21st century capitalist fiscal-monetary policy (taxation, government spending, budget-national debt management, interest rates, inflation targeting, employment, etc.) has been transformed. Today the primary mission of such policy is to directly subsidize capital incomes, both in periods of economic contraction and in subsequent periods of recovery.Keeping interest rates low chronically allows constant cheap credit and the issuance of multi-trillions of dollars of corporate and household debt.Providing excess liquidity fuels financial asset market (stocks, bond, derivatives, etc.) bubbles that boom capital incomes from financial investing. Equally massive, multi-trillion dollar tax cuts for businesses, corporations and investors, bankers and shadow bankers, results in the US alone more than a $1 trillion a year annually in redistribution to shareholders from stock buybacks and dividend payouts (in 2018 rising to $1.4 trillion in US alone). Ever more funding is simultaneously provided for defense and war production.

The direct subsidization fuels the financial asset investing shift and in turn the financial asset bubbles, corporate and household excess debt, and generates the financial fragility and instability in the form of the next crisis. It also results in escalating government sector debt and rising debt servicing costs.

Thus all three major sectors of capitalist economy—business, households, government—keep loading up on debt and leverage. In the US, government debt (national and local, central bank and government agency) is well over $30 trillion. Another $20 trillion could easily be added by 2030. Corporate and business bond and loan debt may be as high as $20 trillion today.And household debt nearly $14 trillion and rising rapidly. The problem of debt is multiplied many fold across the global capitalist economy, with areas of high concentration of either corporate and/or government debt.The amount is easily more than $75 trillion. It is worth repeating, however, that the sheer magnitude of debt is not by itself the problem.The problem is when the incomes for servicing the debt cannot keep up.And that gap widens rapidly when financial asset prices, and other prices, rapidly collapse and contagion spread just as rapidly from the financial to the real economy. Price collapse, beginning with financial markets, is the critical chemical additive that makes the debt problem explode. And when that explosion takes place, the massive debt accumulation at government levels prevents traditional fiscal-monetary policy from playing an economic stabilization role. All it is then used for is to subsidize the losses incurred by owners of capital incomes.

On Reforms and Four Fundamental Challenges to Capitalism Today

Mohsen Abdelmoumen: You are a brilliant economist and a prolific author. Unlike most economists linked to the establishment who see nothing, you keep warning with very solid arguments and careful work that we are heading for another cycle of crises more serious than the previous ones. Is the capitalist system reformable or should we not seek an alternative as soon as possible?

Jack Rasmus: It depends what you mean by ‘reforms’. There are obviously minor reforms that, while important for protecting average folks income, their standard of living, protecting their basic rights and civil liberties, etc., don’t challenge or stop the fundamental drift of US and global capitalism, including its growing tendency toward crises that I noted above. These should be distinguished from structural ‘reforms’ that do attempt to fundamentally change the direction of 21st century global capitalism. These fundamental reforms are, of course, strongly resisted by capitalists and their political representatives. What then are these transformable ‘reforms’?

They would be changes that halt and roll back the financialization and the multiple forces now accelerating income and wealth economy, with emphasis on ‘roll back’ here.They would reverse the changes in the labor markets of recent decades, by prohibiting for example the excess hiring of part time, temp and otherwise ‘contingent’ labor. They would restore an even field for the recovery of unions and collective bargaining.

They would democratize the central banks and give them a new mission to serve not only the banks but the rest of society; central banks would become part of a broader public banking system and their decisions made by elected representatives accountable to all of society (my recent book provides proposals of legislation that would do this). The tax shift of recent decades that gave ever more income to businesses, investors and wealthy 1% would be reversed, perhaps via a financial transaction tax system and would make tax fraud and offshore tax sheltering a criminal offense with guaranteed jail time. And of course the massive $ trillion a year war budget would be significantly reduced by fundamental reforms. All these fundamental reforms challenge the trajectory and dynamics of 21st century capitalism. Capitalists and politicians would vigorously resist them. In that sense the system is not ‘reformable’. Minor reforms are sometimes allowed, and concessions granted especially in times of system crisis. But both kinds of reforms should be aggressively pursued.

There are four great challenges confronting 21st century US dominated global capitalism.It is questionable whether the system can overcome them. If it can’t it will be perceived by the general, non-capitalist populace that it is failing and no long can deliver on improving standards of living or even maintaining past levels of living standards. If that occurs, it’s a game changer. Here are the four great challenges it faces:

1. Will Capitalism be able to resolve the crisis of climate change in the next two decades.

If it can’t do that, the economic negative impacts of climate change by 2040 will have reached such a level that they will become economically unresolvable.Thesystem will be appropriately blamed for not resolving the problem. It remains to be seen if the private profit and capital expansion system of capitalism can co-exist with the climate crisis. Can profits be maintained and the climate crisis simultaneously resolved? We shall see, but I’m not optimistic the two can coexist.

2. Can the system control the coming huge negative impacts of technological change?

We’ve seen how technology has transformed financial and labor markets, to the great detriment of 80%-90% of the working classes. It has spawned new business models like Amazon, Uber, and others that have devastated jobs and wage incomes.In the US more than 50 million are already ‘contingent’ labor of some kind (in Europe and Japan even more) and it’s just the beginning. The real crisis will begin when next decade the technological effects of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning software have an even greater impact. A recent Mckinsey Consultant study predicts a minimum of 30% of all occupations and jobs will be replaced or reduced. How are these people going to earn a decent living, start families, afford housing, etc.? Some say a Guaranteed Basic Income will have to be the answer. I don’t see capitalists going along with that.It’s a ‘structural reform’ they’ll resist tooth and nail. What are the economic and political consequences of AI (note: Artificial Intelligence) if they allow it to happen and drive down living standards for hundreds of millions of workers worldwide? Here again I don’t see the capitalist system, as it pursues profits via AI, being able or willing to soften its massive negative effects on jobs, income and living standards.

3. Will They do anything about accelerating Income Inequality?

Capitalists and politicians talk about this but so far put forward no solutions to it.And the realization of ‘them vs. us’ is beginning to deepen in the consciousness of more workers. That resentment is fueling the right wing populism globally. It is also making the young workers, the millennials and next ‘generation Z’ coming, to turn against the system in droves. Polls in the US show a majority of under 30 year olds now reject the capitalist system as it is and prefer some kind of ‘socialism’. We shouldn’t make too much of this yet, but ‘socialism’ means to them ‘none of the above’ currently.

4. Can capitalists ‘manage’ the radical right populist surge underway?

They think they can but are losing in that effort thus far. They thought they could control Trump, but he is transforming the Republican party by driving out traditional capitalist representative from it and from their initial placement in his administration.He is terrorizing the opposition from within. It’s not unlike what’s going on elsewhere in Europe and South Asia countries where authoritarian right ideologues like Trump and his neocons are slowing changing the political rules of the game in their favor, at the expense of the traditionalists, sometimes called ‘globalists’. But it’s really about an internal internecine intra-capitalist class fight going on the US and elsewhere.A more aggressive and violent wing views the crisis of living standards as an opportunity to assert itself, take control of the institutions of government, transform the State apparatus and bureaucracy to serve it and not the traditionalists, and govern in a more direct way, even approaching a kind of dictatorship of its wing over the formal institutions of government and state. In short, I don’t see that the capitalists have had much success so far in containing this development, this shift toward a more radical right. There are of course some historical parallels here. It’s what Hitler was able to do in the early 1930s. There are numerous disturbing historical parallels between Trump and his movement and Hitler’s early strategies. Of course, the process was accelerating in Germany as the economic and social crisis was more intense and concentrated in a shorter time frame in the 1920s there. The crisis is not as intense yet in the US and the process of Trump’s take over of the political system is more drawn out and protracted. But there are similarities to the process nonetheless. The traditionalist capitalist wing and globalists are clearly ‘losing’ in the US. And if Trump should win another term in 2020, which he might if there’s no recession in the US in the interim, then this transformation of American democracy and American political institutions and culture will then become quite obvious. Meanwhile, we see a similar rightward drift and transformation of the capitalist political systems occurring in the UK, in central Europe, maybe even France soon, in the Philippines, in India, in Brazil-Argentina, in places in Africa and elsewhere. I think the traditionalists have no idea or strategy of how to stop it.

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The great centrist European tradition of social democracy has been receiving a rattle for the last few decades.  The European Parliament elections were a reminder how much their appeal has diminished.  In Denmark, by way of contrast, they have established something of a bridgehead, defeating the centre-right coalition led by the Venstre party’s Lars Løkke Rasmussen in Wednesday’s election.  The Left parties won some 52.1% of the vote with 41% netted by right wing opponents.  Extreme parties such as Stram Kurs were kept out.

But the analysis from outside the country is typically skewed, seeing such a victory as a return to worn social democratic clothing with a grand spring clean.  The votes, seen in raw terms, do show a return to form for the left.  This ignores the actual change of political attire.  Danish voters did not return to any temple of the left and renew progressive vows.  The left, more to the point, has edged, in some cases leaped, to the right.

The response of the Danish Social Democrats in 2015 was not to convince voters about an existing vision for a future vote, but to ape that of the victors.  That year had seen the arrival of 21,000 migrants, causing disruption in the electoral mood.

“I know that many Danes are worried about the future,” claimed the newly elected leader of the party, Mette Frederiksen. “Worried about jobs, about open borders.  About whether we can find a balance in immigration policy.” 

In an interview with TV2, she opined that Denmark was not good at integrating refugee arrivals; nor was it “heroic or humane to bring so many people here that the problems become huge in our own country.”   

Frederiksen’s policy has been to play the devil, the humanitarian and the dissembler.  Social welfare has been returned to the centre of political discussions, but the issue of refugees and asylum seekers has also prominently, and negatively featured.  To TV2 on Monday, she spoke of her interest in implementing “an economic plan that benefits the fight against inequality and invests in welfare.”  The civic compact of the welfare state is to be renewed, but the outsiders, those desperate to be admitted to it, are to be kept at arm’s length. 

In the last four years, strict immigration laws passed by the Rasmussen government have received approval from the Social Democrats.  Frederiksen was doing everything to shrink the gulf with her opponents, not accentuate the difference.  To that end, her party, in 824 legislative votes since 2015, has voted with the government in over 90% of instances. 

Nasty measures sharpened for populist appeal have gotten the nod of approval: the banishment of rejected asylum seekers unable to return home and foreigners convicted of crimes to the island of Lindholm, known for hosting cattle and swine said to possess viral diseases worthy of studying; the grant of intrusive police powers enabling the confiscation of goods held by refugees deemed non-essential and worth more than 10,000 kroner; and fining those wearing garments covering faces in public places.    

In February, the Danish parliament passed the L 140 bill shifting the focus on immigration away from integration to that of repatriation, including those who do not have permanent status and UN quota refugees.  The Social Democrats went along with this “paradigm shift”, despite disagreeing with the reduction of the social welfare benefit known as the integrationsydelsen.  The crude note behind the bill was struck by their spokesperson for immigration Mattias Tesfaye: “People will be given the more honest message that their stay in Denmark is temporary.” 

Spokesperson for the Red-Green alliance Pelle Dragsted summed up the view in some disgust.

“The essence of this is about making life harder and more unpleasant for people who have come here to escape Assad’s barrel bombs and the sex slavery and terror of Islamic State.” 

The Social Democrats have also campaigned on shifting the focus from Denmark the processing state to countries, and regions, of origin, dubbing it a “Marshall plan for Africa”.  Go to the source of ruination, and improve it with structural and financial incentives.  We shall help more, goes the party’s policy, though “we cannot help all in Europe and Denmark.”    

Despite a collapse in the 2019 election (their number of 37 mandates shorn by 21), the Danish People’s Party (Dansk Folkeparti) supplies a text book example of how parties of the far right can terrify and convince their opponents into shifting ground.  When its candidates first started finding a voice in Denmark’s parliament in 1998, the focus was always on tightening immigration, with a conspicuous anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant bias.  The welfare state would take pride and place, but outsiders would be frowned upon.  

The DPP, in other words, sounded much like convinced Social Democrats incarnations, at least on social and economic policy.  They proved religious defenders against any increases in the legal retirement age, advocates for lower taxes for low wage earners and promoters of better labour conditions.  In 2001, 2011 and again in 2015, they made good their reputation of being kingmakers but would often to do with forces infected by economic rationalism.  

While disaffected Social Democratic voters would find a temporary home in the DPP, this was done at some cost.  Knowing this, Frederiksen was always careful to keep the DPP close, mindful of any future power arrangements. 

“In Denmark,” she claimed in 2017, “you are entitled to almost all benefits from day one.  It’s a difficult system when large numbers of people come into the country.”  

Frederiksen was also handed a pre-electoral gift by her opponent.  A day before the poll, Prime Minister Rasmussen was keen to shake off some of the more influential rightist groups that might have a say in a future government.  The New Right and Stram Kurs, for instance, were not going to be “realistic” partners in any conservative bloc.  “If there’s a blue majority tomorrow, I feel convinced that it would include parties that I will not accommodate.” 

Rasmussen saw the situation mirrored on the part of his Social Democrat opponents.  Should the progressives do well in the elections, Frederiksen would have to share with parties of the far left persuasion.  “The alternative is there will be no blue majority.  And then we have a situation in which a Social Democratic prime ministerial candidate must accommodate the far left.  Neither option is in Denmark’s interests.”  The desired route?  A partnership with the Social Democrats to push the extreme wings of both sides out.  The idea lacked wings, and never took off. 

The pooh-poohing of fellow conservative members so close to the vote did Rasmussen few favours.  Frederiksen found herself able to muster the numbers of a red bloc, though its shape is still forming.  The extreme voices of the Stram Kurs movement were kept out.  Denmark has confirmed its status as a political mutation parochial of the welfare state but sharply sceptical about refugees.  What this says about social democracy is also significant: to be relevant, argues Frederiksen, the movement must be able to “appeal to those who are most strongly affected by the challenges of the future and the changes in our society”.  If this demands dry tear ducts and a hardening of the heart towards outsiders, then so be it. To the victor go the dubious and tarnished spoils. 

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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]

As international condemnation of the latest U.S. sanctions continues to grow, three cruise lines operating on the island began to withdraw and apologize to their guests for changes in itineraries, with some 800,000 passengers affected

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As international condemnation of the unilateral sanctions imposed by the United States on Cuba June 5 continues to grow, the measures have already had an impact. Three of the four U.S. cruise lines operating on the island, began to withdraw and apologize to their guests for changes in itineraries. The largest cruise ship operator in the world, Carnival, well known for its customary stops in Cuban ports, informed clients that it was forced to cancel visits to Havana and apologized for “the unexpected change.”

Thus customers who were on board the Carnival Sensation, which departed two days before the ban and was set to travel to Havana, was obliged to continue on to Cozumel, Mexico. The company said it regretted the change and recognized Havana as a “unique destination,” offering “a full refund” to those who decided to cancel the trip.

According to Prensa Latina, Royal Caribbean Cruises said it would adjust departure itineraries planned for June 5 and 6, since “they will not stop in Cuba.”

The president of the International Association of Cruise Lines (CLIA), Adam Goldstein, said he was disappointed and reported that almost 800,000 passenger reservations currently scheduled, or in progress, will be impacted, with the Association’s member companies forced to eliminate all Cuban destinations on their itineraries immediately, since the new travel restrictions “make sea crossings to Cuba from the United States illegal”.

“For its part, the United States-Cuba Business Council, affiliated with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, called for respecting freedom of travel, while the Engage Cuba coalition said that the sanctions represent an attack on a fundamental right of citizens and that Cubans should not be used” as political pawns.

“The executive director of the Center for Democracy in the Americas, Emily Mendrala, described the new measures as a step backward, “which will only undermine the commercial interests of the United States and further divide Cuban families.

“Meanwhile, U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) announced that he will introduce the “Freedom for Americans to Travel to Cuba Act,” calling the latest sanctions “dumb,” and hypocritical, since Washington has serious differences with other countries and does not prohibit U.S. citizens from visiting them.

Leahy recalled that an overwhelming majority of the U.S. people oppose these prohibitions, saying,

“I urge all Senators to not let the same old, worn out, Cold War, isolationist, fear mongering, failed arguments about Cuba stand in the way of common sense.” Cubans chose a path 150 years ago. While others choose to hate and destroy, this people will continue to belong – with the truth on our side – to the band of those who “love and create” as José Martí would say.

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Featured image: The Cuban people demand an end to the economic, commercial, and financial blockade imposed by the United States. Source: Granma Archives

Is Roméo Dallaire a genocide denier?

After a (question free) talk at Concordia University this week I followed the famous Canadian general out of the room to ask why he still supports ruthless dictator Paul Kagame. Kagame is the individual most responsible for the mass slaughter in Rwanda in mid-1994 since his forces invaded the country, engaged in a great deal of killing and blew up the presidential plane that unleashed the genocidal violence.

In 1996 Kagame’s forces invaded the Congo to overthrow the government in Kinshasa and when their installed president kicked them out they reinvaded in 1998, causing an eight country war that left millions dead. According to a 600-page report by the UN high commissioner for human rights, Rwanda was responsible for “crimes against humanity, war crimes, or even genocide” in the Congo.

With Dallaire refusing to answer my question I asked a Radio Canada journalist seeking to interview the former general to ask why he supports Kagame. The reporter was there to question Dallaire about the use of the term “genocide” in the Final Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. Dallaire said he had “a problem” with the use of the word “genocide” to describe what happened to First Nations. “Is that an act of genocide? Is it?” he said.

“My definition of genocide, I read it very deliberately at the start of the Rwandan genocide, and it was a deliberate act of a government to exterminate deliberately, and by force and directly, an ethnicity or a group or an entity of human beings.”

Numerous media outlets picked up Dallaire’s comments. A La Presse headline read “Dallaire denounces the use of the term ‘genocide’” while Rebel Media’s The Ezra Levant Show reported on, “Rwandan genocide witness General Roméo Dallaire’s strong denouncement of Justin Trudeau’s agreement that the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women findings indeed constitute a ‘genocide.’”

While Dallaire is opposed to labeling Canada’s dispossession of First Nations a genocide, he has repeatedly employed the term to describe rights violations in enemy states. In recent years he’s compared the situation of Darfur is in Sudan and Baha’i in Iran, as well as Syria and Libya, to Rwanda. If Western interventionists are targeting a nation Dallaire is happy to employ the “G” word or “R” comparison.

Interestingly, Dallaire’s criteria for a genocide — “a deliberate act of a government to exterminate deliberately” — better applies to indigenous people in Canada than to the Tutsi in Rwanda. Dispossessed of 99% of their land, Indigenous people have faced state-backed efforts to starve and sterilize them. They’ve also been made wards of the state, had their movement restricted and religious/cultural ceremonies banned. Residential schools and other so-called child welfare initiatives sought to eradicate their ways, or in the infamous formulation of the deputy superintendent of the Department of Indian Affairs from 1913 to 1932, Duncan Campbell Scott: “Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question.”

Prior to confederation, British forces conquered today’s Nova Scotia through terror, putting the heads of Mi’kmaq soldiers on spikes and offering bounties to kill women and children. Founder of the Halifax fort, Lieutenant General Edward Cornwallis led the charge and by the mid-1760s the Mi’kmaq had been largely wiped out in Nova Scotia.

After British forces conquered Quebec General Jeffery Amherst’s forces gave indigenous chiefs in the Great Lakes region blankets and a handkerchief from a smallpox hospital. Commander of British forces in North America, Amherst wrote:

“You will do well to try to inoculate the Indians by means of blankets as well as to try every other method that can serve to extirpate this execrable race.”

By the 1820s the Beothuk in Newfoundland were extinct. On the West Coast in 1862 colonial officials are accused of enabling the spread of smallpox among First Nations, which devastated the indigenous population.

Unlike the Tutsi in Rwanda, indigenous people in Canada didn’t end up in power after the “genocide”. Nor did Jews in Germany, the Herero in Namibia, Armenians in Turkey, Maya in Guatemala, etc. Rwanda is a peculiar case where the minority — 10% of the population — targeted for extermination ended up ruling after the bulk of the violence subsided.

That’s partly because the genocidal killings were not a long planned attempt to exterminate all Tutsi, which even the victors’ justice dispensed by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) effectively concluded. Instead, it was the outgrowth of a serious breakdown in social order that saw hundreds of thousands slaughtered by relatively disorganized local ‘militias’ fearful of the Kagame-led foreign invasion that eventually conquered Rwanda and drove a quarter of the population out of the country. Probably an equal — and possibly a greater — number of Hutu were killed.

Dallaire has propagated a wildly simplistic account of the tragedy that gripped Rwanda and Burundi in the mid-1990s. He has promoted the Kagame-inspired fairy tale used to justify a brutal dictatorship in Rwanda and its expansionism in the region (as well as Western liberal imperialism). According to the most outlandish aspect of this story, Hutu extremists murdered the Hutu presidents of Rwanda and Burundi and much of the Hutu-led Rwandan military command, weakening the Hutu government to its most frail point in three decades, and then decided to begin a long planned systematic extermination of Tutsi. In this depiction of Rwanda’s tragedy, the individual most responsible for unleashing the genocidal violence is the hero who ended “the Genocide”.

In his 2005 book Le Patron de Dallaire Parle (The Boss of Dallaire Speaks), Jacques-Roger Booh Booh, a former Cameroon foreign minister and overall head of mid-1990s UN mission in Rwanda, claims Dallaire had little interest in the violence unleashed by Kagame’s RPF despite reports of summary executions in areas controlled by them. Booh Booh says Dallaire turned a blind eye to RPF weapons coming across the border from Uganda and he believes the UN forces under Dallaire’s command may have even transported weapons directly to the RPF, “becoming an objective ally of one of the parties in the conflict.”

Dallaire’s criticism of the Final Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls is consistent with his political interventions. He has long been a cheerleader for Canadian and Western domination of the world. As I detail in this article, the former general opposed calls to withdraw Canadian soldiers from Afghanistan, supported the overthrow of Haiti’s elected government in 2004 and bombing of Libya in 2011. He has also called for increased military spending and for Canada to join US ballistic missile “defence”. Now he appears to be denying a genocide perpetrated by a government he represented in the Senate and worked for in the military. Boil it all down and it simply becomes: ‘Our side is good and our enemies are bad.’

But, of course, this is what passes for foreign policy in Canada.

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Escalating his policy to economically strangle Cuba, Donald Trump has imposed new restrictions on travel to Cuba by U.S. persons. The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) will no longer allow the popular “people-to-people” educational travel and they will deny licenses to cruise ships, the most common way people visit Cuba.

“While this further escalation of the Trump administration’s economic war on Cuba is very harmful to the people of Cuba and its private sector, it also directly impacts U.S. people,” Art Heitzer, chairperson of the National Lawyers Guild Cuba Subcommittee, told Truthout. “It will limit their freedom to travel, disrupting the lives and jobs of many Cuban-Americans in south Florida.”

Ironically, it is the voters in south Florida — many of them expatriated Cubans — whom Trump seeks to please with his shameful Cuba policy. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) has long been angling for regime change in Cuba. The New York Times called Rubio “a virtual secretary of state for Latin America.” Early in his presidency, Trump told administration officials that his strategy on Cuba was to “Make Rubio happy.”

In an unprecedented move last month, Trump, egged on by Rubio, decided to allow potentially thousands of lawsuits that will depress tourism and investment in Cuba.

When announcing the administration’s new restrictions on travel to Cuba, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said,

“This Administration has made a strategic decision to reverse the loosening of sanctions and other restrictions on the Cuban regime. These actions will help to keep U.S. dollars out of the hands of Cuban military, intelligence, and security services.”

But it is the Cuban people who will suffer from restrictions on tourism, which is critical to Cuba’s economy. This is an extension of the economic embargo the United States has maintained against Cuba since the Cuban Revolution. A secret State Department memo written in 1960 proposed making life so miserable for the Cuban people, they would overthrow the new Castro government. The memo advocated “a line of action which, while as adroit and inconspicuous as possible, makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.” The economic blockade continues to hurt the Cuban people although it has failed in its goal to overthrow the Cuban government.

Mnuchin also claimed,

“Cuba continues to play a destabilizing role in the Western Hemisphere, providing a communist foothold in the region and propping up U.S. adversaries in places like Venezuela and Nicaragua by fomenting instability, undermining the rule of law, and suppressing democratic processes.”

In fact, it is the U.S. government that is fomenting instability in Latin America. Team Trump is trying to illegally change Venezuela’s regime. The U.S. government blames Cuba for their own failed attempts to overthrow the Nicolás Maduro government in Venezuela.

Trump threatened Cuba with “a full and complete” embargo if it didn’t “immediately” stop supporting the Maduro government. But Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez stated at a news conference, “This is vulgar calumny. Cuba does not have troops nor military forces nor does it participate in military or security operations of the sister Republic of Venezuela.” Rodriguez’s denial was confirmed by the CIA, which concluded that Cuba’s assistance is much less critical to Venezuela than U.S. officials had claimed, according to The New York Times.

Nevertheless, the Trump administration continues to escalate its economic warfare against Cuba. Now it has eliminated the people-to-people travel license, and prohibited cruise ships and private aircraft from traveling to Cuba, effective June 5, 2019.

New Rules End Person-to-Person Educational Travel License

Congress has established 12 categories of people who can lawfully travel to Cuba under a general license. They include the following:

• Family visits;
• Official business of the U.S. government, foreign governments, and certain intergovernmental organizations;
• Journalistic activity;
• Professional research and professional meetings;
• Educational activities;
• Religious activities;
• Public performances, clinics, workshops, athletic and other competitions, and exhibitions;
• Support for the Cuban people;
• Humanitarian projects;
• Activities of private foundations or research or educational institutes;
• Exportation, importation, or transmission of information or information materials;
• Certain authorized export transactions.

Only Congress can omit or add to any of these 12 categories. But different presidential administrations redefine what is permitted under each category. Trump’s newly announced policy narrows the purview of one of these categories. Now “people-to-people” travel will not be licensed under the category of “educational activities.”

General licenses had been allowed for travel that facilitated “people-to-people” contact between U.S. and Cuban people. The Treasury Department defines a “people-to-people” license as “an authorization, subject to conditions, for persons subject to U.S. jurisdiction to engage in certain educational exchanges in Cuba on an individual basis or under the auspices of an organization that is a person subject to U.S. jurisdiction and sponsors such exchanges to promote people-to-people contact.”

Trump’s new policy “kills the people-to people category, which is the most common way for the average American to travel to Cuba,” according to Collin Laverty, head of Cuba Educational Travel, one of the biggest companies in the United States that handles travel to Cuba.

Passenger and Recreational Vessels and Private Aircraft Can’t Travel to Cuba

Under the new rules, passenger and recreational vessels (including cruises ships, fishing boats, sailboats and yachts) and private and corporate aircraft will no longer be licensed to visit Cuba. Most people who travel to Cuba arrive on cruise ships.

From January to April of 2019, 142,000 Americans stopped in Cuba while on cruises, compared to 114,000 who traveled by airplane. The ban on cruises will be “devastating to the travel industry and the Cuban people,” said Tom Popper, president of the travel company insightCuba. Cruise Lines International Association, a cruise industry group, estimates that the new prohibition will affect approximately 800,000 passenger bookings.

Private and corporate aircraft will not be permitted to travel from the U.S. to Cuba. But commercial flights will still be allowed.

The Trump regime has threatened more sanctions against Cuba. It is not clear whether they will impose additional travel restrictions.

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Copyright Truthout. Reprinted with permission. 

Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers and a member of the advisory board of Veterans for Peace. Her most recent book is Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

It is one of the greatest lies that most Americans – in fact most people around the world – have never heard of. And it reveals much about the true relationship between the United States and one of its “closest allies,” the State of Israel.

This was an act of war — a false flag attack, a mass execution, a war crime, a gross betrayal, and the beginning of an exercise in deception and propaganda that continues to this day.

It was 50 years ago that Israel launched a shocking and brutal attack on an American intelligence ship, the USS Liberty, as it cruised in international waters near the Sinai Peninsula and the coast of Gaza. In the intervening years, the governments of the two countries — as well as the mainstream media — have maintained a grotesque and transparent cover-up in support of the lie that the incident was a simply a “tragic accident,” a case of “mistaken identity.”

But the survivors know that this was no accident.

Over a span of close to two hours on the afternoon of June 8, 1967, under clear blue skies, the Israeli military did all it could do to sink the Liberty and kill all 294 on board, three of those civilians. This did not succeed, but at the end of the attack, 34 crew members were dead and between 171 and 174 were injured (depending on which source you use). The ship had been positively identified by Israeli planes as an American ship as early as 6 a.m. that day, eight hours before the attack began.

The assault on the Liberty, which flew a large American flag (as confirmed by every surviving member of the crew) and clear identification on its hull as a non-combat ship, took place on the fourth day of Israel’s Six Day War against Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. The NSA spy ship looked like no other in the region as it carried all manner of sophisticated surveillance equipment.

The Liberty had been ordered into the Mediterranean Sea to monitor communications related to the Arab/Israeli conflict (although its precise mission remains classified). At 2 p.m., it was hit by a rocket attack launched from fighter jets travelling at high speed. The nightmare was just beginning.

The ship was hit with rockets, cannon fire, and even napalm. Eight sailors were killed in this initial assault. The Liberty was unable to contact the Sixth Fleet for help because its emergency frequency had been jammed and communications equipment badly damaged or destroyed. But sometime later, one brave crew member risked his life to make temporary repairs, and as a result, a distress signal was sent to two aircraft carriers in the region, the USS Saratoga and the USS America.

Planes were immediately dispatched to aid the Liberty. The pilots were authorized at that time to destroy the attacking planes and ships. But before they could arrive, new orders were given recalling them — even though the attack was still ongoing.

About 35 minutes into the attack, three Israeli ships reached the scene and began launching torpedoes. One hit the Liberty, killing another 26 crewmen and created a nearly 40-foot hole in the hull. In addition, a steady spray of machine gun fire targeted firefighters and rescue workers who were carrying stretchers with the wounded. The Israeli boats even fired upon life rafts that had been lowered into the water in an effort to save the most seriously hurt. An order to abandon ship had to be rescinded.

In 2005, the USS Liberty Veterans Association sent a report entitled, “A Report: War Crimes Committed Against U.S. Military Personnel, June 8, 1967,” to the Secretary of the Army. In that report, we learn how the attack came to an end while the Liberty was still afloat.

“Shortly after the Sixth Fleet transmission of the rules of engagement to its dispatched rescue aircraft, the Israeli torpedo boats suddenly broke off their attack and transmitted messages asking if USS Liberty required assistance. At the same time, an Israeli naval officer notified the US Naval Attaché at the American Embassy in Tel Aviv that Israeli forces had mistakenly attacked a United States Navy ship and apologized. The Naval Attaché notified the United States Sixth Fleet and the rescue aircraft were recalled before they arrived at the scene of the attack.” P.8

Most Americans are completely unaware of this act of war by one ally against another. The main reason for this is that the American media have almost completely suppressed any mention of the event. Statements by high-level military and civilian officials have received virtually no attention. Researcher Alison Weir, who has written extensively about the history of Palestine and Israel, wrote an article on the web site If Americans Knew about the media silence that is well worth reading:

“Whatever the reason, until American news media start being conscientious enough to get their reports on Israel right, Americans are going to continue being disastrously misinformed about one of the globe’s most destabilizing, tragic, and potentially calamitous areas of conflict.”

An article on Washington’s Blog from February 2015 sums up the evidence that the Israelis knew full well that they were attacking an American ship.

“Recently-declassified radio transcripts between the Israeli attack forces and ground control show that — at least 3 times — an Israeli fighter jet pilot identified the craft as American, and asked whether ground control was sure he should attack. Ground control repeatedly said, yes, attack the vessel.”

The article also explains how the aim of this for Israel was to make it look like Egypt had been responsible for the attack, potentially bringing the U.S. into the war.

An exception to the general media blackout of this subject is a 2007 article in the Baltimore Sun, which deals in some detail with the question of how the Israelis had to know they were attacking an American ship and how this has been confirmed by declassified government documents.

“[The documents] strengthen doubts about the U.S. National Security Agency’s position that it never intercepted the communications of the attacking Israeli pilots — communications, according to those who remember seeing them, that showed the Israelis knew they were attacking an American naval vessel.

“The documents also suggest that the U.S. government, anxious to spare Israel’s reputation and preserve its alliance with the U.S., closed the case with what even some of its participants now say was a hasty and seriously flawed investigation.”

Report findings changed in Washington

A U.S. Navy Court of Inquiry was ordered immediately after the attack but only given a week to assess what had happened. For 37 years, the senior legal counsel to the Inquiry, Capt. Ward Boston Jr., kept his feelings about that attack and the hasty investigation to himself. But after a book supporting the official cover-up was written by Jay Cristol called The Liberty Incident, Boston felt compelled to speak out.

He reveals that Admiral John S. McCain (father of former presidential candidate John McCain), who was Commander-in-Chief of U.S. Naval Forces in Europe, refused the request by Boston and the Inquiry’s president, Admiral Isaac C. Kidd, that they be allowed to travel to Israel to interview those who participated in the attack. A request that they be able to interview wounded crew members who could not physically attend the hearings was also denied.

In his statement, dated Jan. 9, 2004, Boston makes some incredible charges, including that the Inquiry’s final report was changed in Washington to absolve Israel:

“The evidence was clear. Both Admiral Kidd and I believed with certainty that this attack, which killed 34 American sailors and injured 172 others, was a deliberate effort to sink an American ship and murder its entire crew.

I am certain that the Israeli pilots that undertook the attack, as well as their superiors, who had ordered the attack, were well aware that the ship was American.

“I am outraged at the efforts of the apologists for Israel in this country to claim that this attack was a case of “mistaken identity.”

“Admiral Kidd told me, after returning from Washington, D.C. that he had been ordered to sit down with two civilians from either the White House or the Defense Department, and rewrite portions of the court’s findings.

“Admiral Kidd also told me that he had been ordered to “put the lid” on everything having to do with the attack on USS Liberty. We were never to speak of it and we were to caution everyone else involved that they could never speak of it again.

“I have no reason to doubt the accuracy of that statement as I know that the Court of Inquiry transcript that has been released to the public is not the same one that I certified and sent off to Washington.

He concludes:

“Contrary to the misinformation presented by Cristol and others, it is important for the American people to know that it is clear that Israel is responsible for deliberately attacking an American ship and murdering American sailors, whose bereaved shipmates have lived with this egregious conclusion for many years.”

It must be noted that the incident has actually been condemned by some very high-profile people, including then Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, who was named chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff shortly after the Liberty attack.

In a diplomatic note from June 10, 1967, Rusk wrote to the Israeli ambassador:

The subsequent attack by Israeli torpedo boats, substantially after the vessel was or should have been identified by Israeli military forces, manifests the same reckless disregard for human life. . . . The U.S.S. Liberty was peacefully engaged, posed no threat whatsoever to the torpedo boats, and obviously carried no armament affording it a combat capability. It could and should have been scrutinized visually at close range before torpedoes were fired.”

Moorer, who passed away in 2004, published this statement in 1997:

“Israel knew perfectly well that the ship was American. After all, the Liberty’s American flag and markings were in full view in perfect visibility for the Israeli aircraft that overflew the ship eight times over a period of nearly eight hours prior to the attack. I am confident that Israel knew the Liberty could intercept radio messages from all parties and potential parties to the ongoing war, then in its fourth day, and that Israel was preparing to seize the Golan Heights from Syria despite President Johnson’s known opposition to such a move. I think they realized that if we learned in advance of their plan, there would be a tremendous amount of negotiating between Tel Aviv and Washington.

“And I believe Moshe Dayan concluded that he could prevent Washington from becoming aware of what Israel was up to by destroying the primary source of acquiring that information the USS Liberty. The result was a wanton sneak attack that left 34 American sailors dead and 171 seriously injured. What is so chilling and cold-blooded, of course, is that they could kill as many Americans as they did in confidence that Washington would cooperate in quelling any public outcry.”

A deliberate act of murder

Before his death, Moorer participated in the “Independent Commission of Inquiry into the Israeli Attack on USS Liberty, the Recall of Military Rescue Support Aircraft while the Ship was Under Attack, and the Subsequent Cover-up by the United States Government,” a blue-ribbon commission formed to study the events of that day. Other members included General Raymond G. Davis, Rear Admiral Merlin Staring, and Ambassador James Akins (former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia).

Among the Commission’s most explosive findings were:

• That there is compelling evidence that Israel’s attack was a deliberate attempt to destroy an American ship and kill her entire crew;
• That in attacking USS Liberty, Israel committed acts of murder against American servicemen and an act of war against the United States;
• That fearing conflict with Israel, the White House deliberately prevented the U.S. Navy from coming to the defense of USS Liberty by recalling Sixth Fleet military rescue support while the ship was under attack;
• That although Liberty was saved from almost certain destruction through the heroic efforts of the ship’s Captain, William L. McGonagle (MOH), and his brave crew, surviving crew members were later threatened with ’court-martial, imprisonment or worse’ if they exposed the truth; and were abandoned by their own government;
• That due to the influence of Israel’s powerful supporters in the United States, the White House deliberately covered up the facts of this attack from the American people;
• That due to continuing pressure by the pro-Israel lobby in the United States, this attack remains the only serious naval incident that has never been thoroughly investigated by Congress; to this day, no surviving crew member has been permitted to officially and publicly testify about the attack;
• That there has been an official cover-up without precedent in American naval history; the existence of such a cover-up is now supported by statements of Rear Admiral Merlin Staring, USN (Ret.), former Judge Advocate General of the Navy; and Captain Ward Boston, USN, (Ret.), the chief counsel to the Navy’s 1967 Court of Inquiry of Liberty attack;
• That the truth about Israel’s attack and subsequent White House cover-up continues to be officially concealed from the American people to the present day and is a national disgrace
• That a danger to our national security exists whenever our elected officials are willing to subordinate American interests to those of any foreign nation, and specifically are unwilling to challenge Israel’s interests when they conflict with American interests.

The USS Liberty Veterans Association report mentioned earlier sums up the events from the perspective of the survivors. It tells a powerful story. From the report’s conclusion:

“The failure of the United States government to undertake a complete investigation of the Israeli attack on USS Liberty has resulted in grievous harm to the surviving victims, as well as to the families of all crew members.

Equally serious, this failure has resulted in an indelible stain upon the honor of the United States of America. It has sent a signal to America’s serving men and women that their welfare is always subordinate to the interests of a foreign state. The only conceivable reason for this failure is the political decision to put the interests of Israel ahead of those of American servicemen, employees, and veterans.” P.32

It also tells the story of how the veterans continue to be viciously attacked by Israel and its supporters. On page 20 of the report, we read of how the victims of the attack are still victimized to this day:

“As a result of the public relations campaign undertaken on behalf of Israel, the USS Liberty survivors have been vilified for their assertions that the attack was deliberate and for their ongoing quest for justice. They are characterized as “neo-Nazis”, “anti-Semites”, and “conspiracy theorists” for wanting nothing more than an honest, open investigation of the attack on their ship and themselves.”

While monetary compensation was paid to the survivors and the families of those killed, no one in the Israeli military has even been reprimanded for their part in the attack.

The Jewish Virtual Library web site has an article that sums up the growing questions that Israel carried out the attack with intent and premeditation. But just when you think you might be reading a fairly even-handed assessment of the evidence comes this:

“The picture that emerges is not one of crime at all, nor even of criminal negligence, but of a string of failed communications, human errors, unfortunate coincidences and equipment failures on both the American and Israeli sides – the kind of tragic, senseless mistake that is all too common in the thick of war.”

An Israeli court of inquiry into the Liberty attack amounted to nothing more than an official cover-up. The inquiry concluded that the ship had no flag at all identifying it, which was contradicted by everyone on board (the ship initially flew a 5 x 8 foot flag but that became damaged in the attack, it was replaced with a second much larger one. The inquiry also concluded that a report that a ship had been shelling Israeli positions in the Sinai Peninsula led to confusion and errors.

What have we learned?

I understand that many of you reading this article will feel you already understand the implications of this event. In addition to perhaps having read all about the USS Liberty, you may have educated yourselves about geopolitics, false flags, and how power is wielded within a fog of lies and propaganda. You may also know the history of Israel and Zionism and what has been done to the Palestinian people over the past seven decades.

But if you do understand all of this, you are part of a very small minority. Most have never heard of this terrible act of barbarity and therefore have no idea what its implications are. Nevertheless, there are some serious lessons we must all learn from this event (and I’m sure readers could contribute more):

1. Israel is capable of attacking its allies, and especially the U.S., to further its Zionist agenda. One can’t help but think about 9/11 in this regard.
2. Israel will lie to America to draw it into a war under false pretenses. It also has no problem blaming a third party like Egypt for an atrocity it did not commit.
3. Israel wields sufficient power within American circles of power that the U.S. government is more concerned about not embarrassing Israel than it is about defending its own people.
4. The American media will participate in a cover-up of an act of war against America rather than point the finger at Israel.
5. Israel uses the same attacks against the Liberty survivors that governments and mainstream media use to marginalize “conspiracy theorists.”
6. Israel will also play the “anti-Semitic” and “neo-Nazi” cards against American servicemen who were victimized in the attack and who are continuing to demand accountability.
7. Even half a century later, the American government will continue to protect this lie and allow the victimization of the survivors to continue.

Israel cultivates the image of a country and a people who are victims, constantly under threat. But one thing that this horrifying event really makes clear is that Israel threatens anyone or any country — even supposed “friends” — that get in the way of its political objectives.

Some observers have claimed that the USS Liberty attack was a false flag intended to implicate Egypt and draw the U.S. into a war that it did not want to be part of. Certainly Israel’s determination to sink the ship and kill all aboard supports this idea. Others believe Israel was afraid the Americans would learn through the Liberty’s surveillance efforts that Israel was planning to initiate hostilities with Jordan or Syria, which it had been urged not to do by Lyndon Johnson. Perhaps both are true.

But whatever the specific goals, this dark moment in history clearly reveals much that we should be talking about today. And like 9/11, it is one of those events that shows us how our world really functions and how what we see on the TV news and in newspapers is more about hiding the truth than explaining it.

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This article, posted originally on Truth and Shadows in June 2016, has been updated for the 50th anniversary of the attack on the U.S.S. Liberty (June 8, 2017).

The US Treasury Department has announced a hardening of measures against Venezuela’s oil industry.

In an amendment to the Venezuela sanctions published on Thursday, Washington stated that the existing licenses, which allow certain companies to continue dealing with Venezuela state oil company PDVSA for a given period, “do not authorize transactions or dealings related to the exportation or reexportation of diluents, directly or indirectly, to Venezuela.”

Venezuela relies on imports of diluents to blend its heavy crude into exportable grades, as well as produce gasoline and diesel for internal consumption.

Venezuela’s declining oil production was significantly worsened by the impact of US economic sanctions, with crude output dropping by 30 percent, from an average of 1.911 million barrels per day (bpd) in 2017 to 1.354 million in 2018, following the August 2017 financial sanctions imposed by the Treasury Department.

Output further fell in 2019 as a result of the late January US embargo as well as nationwide blackouts in March, falling to just 740 thousand bpd in March before rebounding slightly in April. Output in May has reportedly fallen 17 percent from April. Oil exports to the US fell from over 500 thousand bpd in January to zero in late May, as the three month winding down period from January’s measures came to an end.

Restrictions on diluent imports have led to recent gasoline shortages, with long queues witnessed at gas pumps, particularly in the west of the country. Imports of fuel and diluents reportedly fell to 137,500 bpd in May, from over 200,000 bpd in March and April. National demand is estimated at around 250,000 bpd.

Fuel shortages were also a factor during the March electricity crisis, as backup thermoelectric plants could not be brought online due to lack of diesel. An estimated one-fifth of the country’s thermoelectric capacity is currently operational.

Caracas scrambled to find new buyers in the wake of the US oil embargo, seeking to divert exports to India as well as swap crude for diluents or fuel in a bid to to circumvent US sanctions. However, US officials pressured companies into winding down their transactions with Venezuela, with reiterated threats of secondary sanctions.

A recent report from the Washington DC think-tank Center for Economic and Policy Research analyzed the impact of sanctions on Venezuela’s oil sector, with an estimated US $6 billion lost in the 12 months following the August 2017 financial sanctions. Authors Mark Weisbrot and Jeffrey Sachs estimate another $6.8 billion in lost export revenue this year should production remain at current levels. The report further argues that US sanctions have been responsible for 40,000 deaths since 2017.

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Featured image: Amuay refining complex in Falcon State. (Wikimedia Commons)

Zur diesjährigen Sitzung der Bilderberggruppe, die vom 30. Mai bis 2. Juni in Montreux in der Schweiz stattfand, waren drei Italiener eingeladen. Es waren mit Lili Gruber, der Moderatorin des Fernsehsenders La7, eine weitere Journalistin, der ständige Moderator der Bilderberg-Gruppe – Stefano Feltri, stellvertretender Direktor von Fatto Quotidiano unter der Leitung von Marco Travaglio. Der „dritte Mann“, den die Bilderberger auswählten, ist Matteo Renzi, Politiker der Partito Democratico und ehemaliger Präsident des Ministerrates.

Die Bilderberggruppe, die 1954 auf Initiative bestimmter US-amerikanischer und europäischer „bedeutender Bürger“ formell gegründet wurde, wurde in Wirklichkeit von der CIA und dem britischen Geheimdienst MI6 gegründet, um die NATO gegen die UdSSR zu unterstützen. Nach dem Kalten Krieg spielte sie weiterhin die gleiche Rolle bei der Unterstützung der Strategie der USA und der NATO.

Die Gäste dieser jährlichen Treffen sind fast ausschließlich Bürger Westeuropas und Nordamerikas. Sie umfassen etwa 130 Vertreter aus Politik, Wirtschaft, Militär, den großen Medien und Geheimdiensten, die formell in privater Funktion teilnehmen. Sie versammeln sich hinter verschlossenen Türen in luxuriösen Hotels, jedes Jahr in einem anderen Land, und werden durch drakonische militärische Sicherheitssysteme geschützt. Journalisten und Beobachtern ist der Zugang nicht gestattet, und es wird nie ein Kommuniqué veröffentlicht. Die Teilnehmer sind zum Schweigen verpflichtet – sie dürfen nicht einmal die Identität der Redner preisgeben, die ihnen Informationen gegeben haben (unter völliger Missachtung ihrer erklärten „Transparenz“). Wir wissen nur, dass sie in diesem Jahr vor allem über Russland und China, Rauminstallationen, eine stabile strategische Ordnung und die Zukunft des Kapitalismus gesprochen haben.

Die wichtigsten Präsenzen in diesem Jahr waren wie immer die der USA: Henry Kissinger, „historische Figur“ der Gruppe, gemeinsam mit dem Bankier David Rockefeller (Gründer des Bilderberger und der Trilateralen Kommission, er starb 2017); Mike Pompeo, Ex-CIA-Chef und derzeit Außenminister; General David Petraeus, Ex-CIA-Chef; Jared Kushner, Berater (und Schwiegersohn) von Präsident Trump für den Nahen Osten und enger Freund des israelischen Premierministers Benjamin Netanyahu. Anschließend folgte Jens Stoltenberg, Generalsekretär der NATO, der ein zweites Mandat für besondere Serviceleistungen für die USA erhielt.

Vier Tage lang haben diese Vertreter in geheimen multilateralen und bilateralen Treffen mit anderen mehr oder weniger bekannten Persönlichkeiten der Großmächte des Westens das Netz der Kontakte verstärkt und erweitert, das es ihnen ermöglicht, die Regierungspolitik und die Ausrichtung der öffentlichen Meinung zu beeinflussen.

Die Ergebnisse sind sichtbar. In Il Fatto Quotidiano verteidigt Stefano Feltri die Bilderberggruppe heftig und erklärt, dass diese Treffen im Geheimen abgehalten werden, um einen Kontext der  klaren  und offenen Debatte zu schaffen, der speziell nicht-institutionell ist, und greift die „zahlreichen Verschwörungstheoretiker“ an, die Legenden über die Bilderberggruppe und die Trilaterale Kommission verbreiten.

Er verzichtet jedoch darauf, die Tatsache zu erwähnen, dass unter diesen „zahlreichen Verschwörungstheoretikern“ Richter Ferdinando Imposimato stand, Ehrenpräsident des Obersten Kassationsgerichts (er starb 2018), der das Ergebnis der von ihm eingeleiteten Ermittlungen wie folgt beschrieb: „Die Bilderberggruppe ist teilweise für die Strategie der Spannungen und damit auch der Massaker verantwortlich“ – angefangen bei der Piazza Fontana, bei der die Bilderberggruppe mit der CIA und den italienischen Geheimdiensten, mit Gladio und den neofaschistischen Gruppen, mit der P2-Loge und den USA-Freimaurer-Logen in NATO-Basen zusammenarbeitete.

Sogar Matteo Renzi ist nun in diesen prestigeträchtigen Club aufgenommen worden. Mit Blick auf die Möglichkeit, dass sie ihn wegen seiner Talente als Analytiker eingeladen haben könnten, bleibt uns die Hypothese, dass diese mächtigen Männer und Frauen heimlich eine andere politische Operation in Italien vorbereiten. Feltri wird uns beschuldigen, dass wir uns den „zahlreichen Verschwörungstheoretikern“ angeschlossen haben.

Hier zu lesen: The Bilderberg Group – the ” élite ” of World Power, vom italienischen Soziologen und Ökonomen Domenico Moro (Übersetzung Marie-Ange Patrizio) Editions Delga, Paris 2015 (€ 19.-). Lesen Sie auch “Presentation au lecteur français” von Bernard Genet (Gastgeber von Comaguer).

Wir haben die offizielle Liste der Teilnehmer an der Sitzung der Bilderberggruppe 2019 wiedergegeben, allerdings mit unserer eigenen Definition ihrer Funktionen: ” Liste des participants à la reunion 2019 du Groupe de Bilderberg “, Voltaire Netzwerk, 1. Juni 2019.

Die Vorbereitung auf unerwartete politische Ereignisse ist eines der Merkmale der Bilderberggruppe. So lud die Gruppe 2014 Emmanuel Macron ein, der seinen Bruch mit François Hollande erklärte. Oder auch im Jahr 2016 der Bürgermeister von Le Havre, Edouard Philippe, der Emmanuel Macron seine Unterstützung erklärte. Die beiden Männer wurden Präsident und Premierminister der Französischen Republik.

Manlio Dinucci

 

Quelle: Il Manifesto (Italien)

Le lunghe mani del gruppo Bildenberg

Übersetzung: K.R.

The Russian military claimed that the U.S.’ guided-missile cruiser Chancellorsville suddenly changed course early Friday morning while on a patrol in the East China Sea and almost collided with the Admiral Vinogradov destroyer that was passing through these waters at the same time.

The U.S. denied this accusation and instead said that it was the Russian vessel that was behaving unprofessionally and putting the lives of everyone involved at risk, though it should be noted that this certainly wasn’t the first time that American forces have been accused of such recklessness.

Actually, there have been several such incidents every year since the 2014 Ukrainian crisis and consequent territorial dispute of Crimea which led to a revival of Cold War tensions between the two great powers, with most of these near-misses occurring in the Baltic Sea, Black Sea, and Syria.

This is the first time that such an event happened in the East China Sea between the two rivals and proves that the Pentagon’s Pacific bellicosity of recent years is finally starting to endanger Russia just as much it’s been endangering China this entire time.

The U.S.’ so-called “freedom of navigation patrols” pass through the South China Sea and seem designed to provoke a military response from Beijing, one which Washington could then expectedly exploit to advance its demonization campaign against China.

Given what’s known about previous near-misses between the Chinese and American navies, one can assume that the U.S. was the party at fault in the latest incident with Russia because of its established pattern of aggressive behavior. Furthermore, it can’t be ruled out that the recent event might have been timed to coincide with the ongoing St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF).

At SPIEF, China and Russia are discussing ways to intensify their cooperation on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which represents the most realistic opportunity to transform international relations away from the fading American-centric unipolarity and towards the more equitable emerging multipolar world order.

The U.S. is very upset that Russia and China moved much closer to one another after EuroMaidan, which interestingly also coincided with the Pentagon’s provocative activity in the South China Sea. The Russian-Chinese partnership isn’t aimed against any third party, but many in the American strategic, political, and media communities are convinced that it’s secretly intended to undermine the U.S., hence the hysterical reaction that they’re having to it.

That said, there’s no denying that Russia and China see eye-to-eye on practically every global issue of significance, and they’ve just found another commonality between them when it comes to the U.S.’ reckless military action in the Pacific.

Russian forces are now endangered by this irresponsible activity just like their Chinese counterparts have been in recent years already, which could add a renewed impetus to these two great powers’ military cooperation with one another, especially in the naval sphere.

Not only that, but Russia is already paying more attention to the Pacific as part of the geopolitical re-balancing act that it’s been engaged in for half a decade already in reaction to the West’s sanctions against it, so it’s only natural for Moscow to take this latest incident very seriously and use it as the opportunity to cooperate even more closely with Beijing than ever before.

This conceivable outcome would add further credence to the theory that the U.S.’ aggression abroad is actually self-defeating and counterproductive because it ultimately lays the basis for equal and opposite reactions that eventually undermine its stated aims.

It’s enough to remember how the U.S.’ hybrid war aggression in Ukraine and conventional naval aggression in the South China Sea brought Russia and China closer together and fulfilled the nightmare scenario that the late former national security adviser and visionary geopolitical theorist Zbigniew Brzezinski warned about in his 1997 seminal work about “The Grand Chessboard.”

The solution as always would be for the U.S. to embrace win-win cooperation with all and reject the zero-sum schemes that got it to this point, but it doesn’t seem like it’s learned its lesson just yet, especially judging by the latest incident.

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This article was originally published on CGTN.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from CGTN